







*o9 













A«3» 






k &++ 'life* ^°* 




-0* ..•^••.*© ^ V 




»bv* 







;, "-w •'« 







**<? 



S\ 




& .: 



o v ... 



y- (V 




^ .** 





. v--.^'\^ C V*T.-V v ; ^V 











<S> •'oio 9 * .^ 






"> 




v v 










/ ^ 



.It 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 
EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY 

TENNYSON 



' h &&$0 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



TENNYSON 



BY 

SIR ALFRED LYALL, K.C.B. 



Nein gotft 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1902 

All rights reserved 



.12 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Cop"-- Recsived 

CfWVWOTHT ENTRY 

CLASS "tXXc No. 

U l •)}> 

COPY 8 



COPYRIGHT, 1902, 

By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped September, 1902. 



J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



6% 



r 



CONTENTS 



9 

CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Boyhood at Cambridge 1 



CHAPTER II 
Poems, 1830-1842 13 

CHAPTER III 
The Princess ; In Memoriam 52 

CHAPTER IV 
Maud ; Idylls of the King ; Enoch Arden . . 83 

CHAPTER V 
Pastorals ; Tennyson's Philosophy .... 118 

CHAPTER VI 
The Plays 154 

CHAPTER VII 
The Last Years and Latest Poetry : Conclusion . 171 



V 



TENNYSON 

CHAPTER I 

BOYHOOD AT CAMBRIDGE 

That the imaginative literature of a period preserves 
and represents the ideas, feelings, and manners of the 
generation to which it belongs, is sufficiently manifest. 
And Taine, in his exposition of the theory upon which 
he wrote his History of English Literature, affirms that 
any considerable literary work will exhibit, under care- 
ful analysis, not only the writer's state of mind, his 
experiences and way of life, but also the long-descended 
influences of race and tradition, the temper of his time, 
and the general intellectual condition of his nation. 
The choice of words (he says), the style, the metaphors 
used, the accent and rhythm of verses, the logical 
order of his reasoning, are all outward forms and signs 
of these complex impressions, and so of the environ- 
ment that has moulded them. Literature, in short, 
may be employed by the critic and the historian as 
a delicate instrument for analysis, for investigating 
the psychology of the man and of his period, for laying 
bare the springs of thought and action which underlie 
and explain history. And poetry is the most intense 
expression of the dominant emotions and the higher 
ideals of the age. 

Whether Taine did not press his theory too far 

B 1 



2 TENNYSON [chap. 

is a question that has been often debated ; and at any 
rate the proper use of it demands a master-hand. 
Certain it is that each age has its peculiar spirit, its 
own outlook on the world ; and that a great poet, or 
group of poets, absorb the new ideas growing up 
around them, and have the gift of inventing their 
appropriate fashion or setting. They are usually fol- 
lowed by a host of imitators ; but when the work has 
been once well done, the highest imitative skill will 
not make it really worth doing again in the same 
manner ; we must wait until the changing world closes 
one period and opens a fresh one. This point of view 
may perhaps be accepted in studying t\e life and works 
of one who has been the chief poet of our own time. 
It is true that the increasing variety and diffusion 
of literature during the nineteenth century interfere 
with the method of taking one writer, however 
eminent, as the intellectual representative of his 
society, and also that we do not yet stand at a suf- 
ficient distance from a contemporary poet to be able 
to measure accurately his position. V Nevertheless, 
Tennyson's popularity grew so steadily and spread so 
widely for nearly sixty years, and his influence over 
his generation has been so remarkable, that his finest 
poetry may undoubtedly be treated as an illustrative 
record of the prevailing spirit, of the temperament, and 
to some degree of the national character of his period. 
It is in Tennyson's poetry, moreover, that we must 
look for the chronicle of his life. That no biographer 
could so truly give him as he gives himself in his own 
works, are almost the first words of the preface to the 
admirable Memoir written of his father by the pres- 
ent Lord Tennyson. So thoroughly, indeed, and so 



i.] BOYHOOD AT CAMBRIDGE 3 

recently, has this biography been written, with such 
complete and exclusive command of all available 
materials, that in regard to the course and incidents 
of the poet's life it leaves almost nothing to be 
discovered or added; and every subsequent narrative 
must draw upon this source of information. Nearly 
all the private or personal facts and incidents connected 
with Tennyson or with his family have, therefore, been 
necessarily taken directly from the Memoir} 

Alfred Tennyson descended from a family that had 
been settled for some centuries in the north-east of 
England, at first in Holderness, beyond the Humber, 
and latterly in Lincolnshire. His father, Dr. George 
Clayton Tennyson, was Rector of Somersby near 
Horncastle, and of other small parishes. Mr. Howitt, 
writing in 1847, says of the Eector that he was a man 
of very various talents, something of a poet, a painter, 
an architect, and a musician. The poet's mother was 
Elizabeth, daughter of the Reverend Stephen Fytche. 
At Somersby he was born on the 6th August 1809 ; 
and when he was seven years old he was sent to school 
at the neighbouring town of Louth. In those days, 
and long afterward, boys made their first, often their 
hardest, experience of a rough world at a very tender 
age, for in these country schools the discipline was 
harsh and the manners rude; so that a child lived 
between fear of the master's rod and the bullying of 
his big schoolmates, and probably learnt little more 
than the habit of endurance. Professor Hales has 
left a record 2 of his experiences at this school, which 

1 The writer of this volume has made some occasional use of 
an article that he contributed on Tennyson to the Edinburgh 
Review. 2 Appendix to vol. i. of the Memoir. 



4 TENNYSON [chap. 

shows that the masters had a way of hitting the boys 
wantonly, an unconscious propensity to find amuse- 
ment in giving pain that often becomes habitual. But 
Tennyson's school experiences, though early, were 
fortunately short, for after two years he was removed 
from Louth, and it appears that for the next ten years 
he was taught at home by his father, whose scholarship 
was considerable. No better luck can befall a boy 
who can avail himself of it than to be left to himself 
among good books while his mind is quite fresh ; and 
Tennyson made full use of the Rector's ample library. 
His earliest verses, at fourteen or fifteen years of age, 
show uncommon promise ; and in 1826, when he was 
seventeen, were published the Poems by Two Brothers 
(Alfred and Charles) upon a variety of subjects, grave 
and gay, evidently drawn from wide miscellaneous 
reading : the metrical composition is promising, while 
there are occasional signs of that descriptive faculty 
which matured so rapidly in Tennyson's later works. 
In 1828 he went, with his brother Charles, to Cam- 
bridge, and matriculated at Trinity College, where 
at first Alfred, being accustomed to home life, and not 
having passed through the preparatory ordeal of a 
public school, found himself solitary and ill at ease. 

" I know not how it is, but I feel isolated here in the midst 
of society. The country is so disgustingly level, the revelry 
of the place so monotonous, the studies of the University so 
uninteresting, so much matter of fact. None but dry-headed, 
angular, calculating little gentlemen can take much delight in 
them." 1 

But his face and figure were both very remarkable, 
and his rare intellectual qualities could not long remain 

1 Memoir, vol. i. p. 34. 



i.] BOYHOOD AT CAMBRIDGE 5 

undiscovered. The list given in the Memoir of the 
friends with whom he consorted shows that he soon 
became intimate with the best men at Cambridge, 
whose admiration and attachment he rapidly won. 
It is evident that he had already a notable gift of terse 
and forcible expression, and the turn for apt meta- 
phors which comes from a lively imagination. He 
lived among men who made the right use of a Uni- 
versity, who delighted in the interchange of ideas and 
opinions, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the discus- 
sion of politics, in literature, speculation, and scientific 
discoveries ; who were keenly interested in the world 
around them, and in the condition of their own country. 
In short, he was one of the few great English poets 
who have fallen in readily with the ways and manners 
of a cultured class and their social surroundings, who 
did not in their youth either hold themselves apart 
from the ordinary life of school or college, or live 
recklessly, or rebel against social conventions. 

As the poets of the foregoing generation had been 
profoundly stirred in their first manhood by the revo- 
lutionary tumult in France, so Tennyson felt and 
sympathised, though more moderately, with the Eng- 
lish agitation for reform. But in 1830 the period of 
wild enthusiasm for freedom, for the rights of man 
and for abstract political theories, had passed away ; 
the vague hatred of priests and despots had become 
toned down into demands for reasonable improvements 
of Church and State. It was an age of practical Lib- 
eralism, of strong intellectual fermentation stimulated 
by the growing power of the Press ; of energetic agi- 
tation for political, economical, and legislative reforms 
on one side, resisted on the other side by stubborn de- 



6 TENNYSON [chap. 

fenders of antiquated institutions that were believed 
to be essential safeguards against the total overthrow 
of society. In those days the ardent young Liberal 
had a definite programme and a clear objective for 
his attack ; though his impulse might be restrained 
by alarm at the violent methods and sweeping theo- 
ries that were in vogue with extreme and resolute 
reformers. Tennyson was never of a sanguine tem- 
perament ; and his reflective mind was always liable 
to be darkened by the apprehension of consequences. 
He represented, naturally, the temperate opinions on 
questions of Church and State of an educated Lib- 
eral, with whom rioting and violent Kadicalism 
strengthened the fellow-feeling for widespread dis- 
tress, and for the real needs and grievances of the 
people. The notes of bitter irony, the spirit of fierce 
revolt that run through the poetry of Byron and 
Shelley, belong to another time and temper. In Ten- 
nyson we have the Englishman's ingrained abhorrence 
of unruly disorder, the tradition of a State well bal- 
anced, of liberty fenced in by laws, of veneration for 
the past; we have the hatred of fanaticism in any 
shape, political or clerical, the distrust of popular 
impatience, the belief in the gradual betterment of 
human ills. In the verses to Mary Boyle, written long 
afterwards, he alludes to an incident that cannot but 
have accentuated his innate dread of mob-rule, which 
comes out in several passages of his later poems — 

" In rick-fire days, 
When Dives loathed the times, and paced his land 

In fear of worse, 
And sanguine Lazarus felt a vacant hand 

Fill with his purse ; 



i.] BOYHOOD AT CAMBRIDGE 7 

For lowly minds were madden 1 d to the height 

By tonguester tricks, 
And once — I well remember that red night 

When thirty ricks, 
All flaming, made an English homestead Hell — 

These hands of mine 
Have helpt to pass a bucket from the well 

Along the line." 

When lie was asked what politics he held, he answered 
characteristically, " I am of the same politics as Shake- 
speare, Bacon, and every sane man " ; and he might not 
have objected to be classed, theologically, among those 
who restrict their confession of faith to the declaration 
that they hold the religion of all sensible men. 

That Tennyson was numbered among the Apostles 
at Cambridge may be reckoned as a sign of his early 
reputation ; the more so because he appears to have 
contributed very little, either by speech or writing, to 
the free discussions on things temporal and spiritual 
of that notable society. He is depicted as smoking 
and meditating, sitting in front of the fire, summing 
up argument in one short phrase ; and the only essay 
that he produced he was too modest to deliver. Of 
the Apostles various reminiscences survive; the sub- 
joined extract may be quoted to explain its constitu- 
tion and character : — 

" The very existence of this body was scarcely known to 
the University at large, and its members held reticence to 
be a point of honour. ... The members were on the look- 
out for any indications of intellectual originality, academical 
or otherwise, and specially contemptuous of humbug, cant, 
and the qualities of the windbag in general. To be elected, 
therefore, was virtually to receive a certificate from some of 
your cleverest contemporaries that they regarded you likely 



8 TENNYSON [chap. 

to be in future an eminent man. The judgment so passed 
was perhaps as significant as that implied by University- 
honours, and a very large proportion of the Apostles have 
justified the anticipation of their fellows." 1 

In Tennyson's case the apostolic prophecy has been 
undoubtedly fulfilled ; and his prize poem on Tinibuc- 
too, written in his twentieth year, soon appeared to 
confirm among his friends their first augury of his 
future celebrity. It was patched up, he tells us, from 
an old poem on the Battle of Armageddon, a curious 
adaptation of subjects that might be supposed to have 
nothing in common ; except, possibly, such hazy dis- 
tances of space and time as might afford wide scope 
to a poet's imagination. 

Academic distinction in verse may have often sug- 
gested predictions of coming fame, yet these are rarely 
fulfilled, for the stars of poetical genius run in irregu- 
lar courses. Tennyson's poem had the usual qualities 
of correct taste and polished diction, but it also showed 
much originality of treatment and creative fancy ; for 
the writer, instead of attempting the unpromising task 
of describing a den of savages, or of rendering poeti- 
cally the accounts brought home by travellers, places 
himself on a mountain that overlooks the great ocean, 
muses over the fabled Atlantis, dreams of Eldorado, 

and asks — 

" Wide Afric, doth thy Sun 
Lighten, thy hills unfold a city as fair 
As those which starred the night of the elder world ? 
Or is the rumour of thy Timbuctoo 
A dream as frail as those. of ancient time ? " 

He is wondering whether the reality of some such 

1 Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, by Leslie Stephen. 



i.] BOYHOOD AT CAMBRIDGE 9 

glorious vision may not be hidden far in the recesses 
of the dark Continent. To him appears the Spirit of 
the Ideal, symbolising 

" The permeating life which courses through 
All th' intricate and labyrinthine veins 
Of the great mine of Fable," 

and shows him a river winding through 



But 



" The argent streets of the city, imaging 
The soft inversion of her tremulous domes." 

"The time has well nigh come 
When I must render up this glorious home 
To keen Discovery," 

when the brilliant towers shall shrink and shiver into 

huts 

" Black specks amid a waste of dreary sand 
Low-built, mud-walled, barbarian settlements. 
How changed from this fair city ! " 

This, the first poem of Tennyson, is worth notice 
because it contains in embryo the qualities which 
emerge in his later verse, his delight in picturesque 
and luxuriant description, his meditative power of 
falling into moods which give full scope, as in a trance 
or dream, to the roving imagination ; his manner of 
presenting ideas symbolically. Although Charles 
Wordsworth wrote of it that at Oxford the poem 
might have qualified its author for a lunatic asylum, 
Arthur Hallam, who was beaten in the competition, 
laid stress, in a letter to W. E. Gladstone, on its 
" splendid imaginative power," and said that he con- 
sidered Tennyson as " promising fair to be the greatest 
poet of our generation " — a remarkably far-seeing pre- 



10 TENNYSON [chap. 

diction to have been built on so slender a founda- 
tion. A review in the Athenaeum (at that time under 
the joint-editorship of John Sterling and Frederick 
Maurice) declared that it "indicated really first-rate 
poetical genius, which would have done honour to 
any man that ever wrote." The poem, in blank 
verse, was recited in the Senate House by the late 
Dean Merivale, since the ordeal was too much for 
Tennyson's habitual diffidence. 

The Memoir has preserved for us several poems 
written by Tennyson at Cambridge (1828-1831) that 
were never published. In one of these, " Anacaona," 
which was suppressed (we are told) because the natural 
history and the rhymes did not satisfy him, the verses 
are full of glowing tropical scenery ; but at that time 
he did not care for absolute descriptive accuracy. The 
scientific spirit, in fact, had not yet laid its hold on 
him ; and the following stanza, given here as a sample, 
shows that he was taking his juvenile pleasure in 
sumptuous colouring and in sounding versification — 

" In the purple island, 

Crown'd with garlands of cinchona, 
Lady over wood and highland, 

The Indian queen, Anacaona, 
Dancing on the blossomy plain 

To a woodland melody : 
Playing with the scarlet crane, 
The dragon-fly and scarlet crane, 

Beneath the papao tree ! 
Happy, happy was Anacaona, 

The beauty of Espagnola, 

The golden flower of Hayti ! " 

The " Song of the three Sisters " is in the same 
early manner, yet it clearly presages his later dithy- 



i.] BOYHOOD AT CAMBRIDGE 11 

rambic style; and the blank verse in the prelude 
exhibits the undeveloped quality of an artist in 
romantic landscape-painting — 

" The North wind fall'n, in the new-starred night 
Zidonian Hanno, wandering beyond 
The hoary promontory of Soloe, 
Past Thymiaterion in calme'd bays 
Between the southern and the western Horn, 
Heard neither warbling of the nightingale, 
Nor melody o' the Libyan Lotus-flute 
Blown seaward from the shore ; but from a slope 
That ran bloom-bright into the Atlantic blue, 
Beneath a highland leaning down a weight 
Of cliffs, and zoned below with cedar-shade, 
Came voices like the voices in a dream 
Continuous — till he reach'd the outer sea." 

Another piece may be worth quoting, as the first 
indication of the brooding philosophic mind that is 
reflected through so much of Tennyson's poetry — 

" Thou may'st remember what I said 
When thine own spirit was at strife 
With thine own spirit. ' From the tomb 
And charnel-place of purpose dead, 
Thro' spiritual dark we come 
Into the light of spiritual life.' 

God walk'd the waters of thy soul, 

And still'd them. When from change to change, 

Led silently by power divine, 

Thy thought did scale a purer range 

Of prospect up to self-control, 

My joy was only less than thine." 

In these lines we have the contemplative mood 
struggling into as yet imperfect metrical expression ; 
and the two foregoing quotations may be taken to 



12 TENNYSON [chap. i. 

illustrate two salient characteristics of all Tenny- 
son's poetry — his delight in external beauty, and the 
inward uneasiness of a mind oppressed by the enigma 
of human existence, yet finding solace in a kind of 
spiritual quietism, and in the glimmer of light some- 
where far beyond the surrounding darkness. 



CHAPTEE II 

POEMS, 1830-1842 

Before he left Cambridge (where he did not wait for 
a degree), his " Poems, chiefly Lyrical," were published. 
It has already been observed that a group of original 
poets take up the whole ground of their generation ; 
they so act upon their audience, and are again reacted 
upon sympathetically, that, for a time, nothing new is 
said or shaped. This may account, in some degree, for 
the barren interval that may be noticed in the annals 
of a country's literature ; there was one such interval 
at the end of the eighteenth century, when the era 
of classic composition had closed, and the Eomantic 
spirit, just born, had as yet become hardly articulate ; 
and since the closing years of the nineteenth century 
another dearth of poetry has set in. At the present 
moment the field is still held by Tennyson and Brown- 
ing, nor has their challenger yet appeared in the lists. 
When Tennyson came forward in 1830 the mar- 
vellous constellation of poets that illumined the first 
quarter of the century had almost vanished, in the 
sense of their work being finished ; for although 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Scott were still alive, 
they had attained immortality ; they were above and 
beyond the special influences of an altering world ; 
they could not interpret or inform the aspirations or 
disquietudes of a younger generation. Those subtle, 

13 



14 TENNYSON [chap. 

indefinable modifications of style and feeling, con- 
tinuous yet always changing, which go on in the 
world and around us, are nowhere more clearly per- 
ceptible than in poetry : the impress of a great master 
in any art deeply affects his immediate successors ; but 
he has almost always given his best to his contem- 
poraries in early manhood, and the school which he 
has founded can do little more than imitate him. 
When, as in Tennyson's case, he keeps the field and 
retains his productive powers for more than half a 
century, he may be likened to a great spreading tree 
that checks the upspring of vigorous undergrowth ; he 
remains the model and criterion of poetic excellence. 
Yet an unconscious feeling that the vein has been 
nearly worked out produces the desire for novelty; 
while there is simultaneously a continuous growth of 
fresh ideas engendered by changing views of life, 
which demand their own interpreter, and have to fight 
hard for ascendency against the established taste. 
Here may probably be found one reason why the 
established organs of criticism so often go wrong in 
their estimate of an original writer when he first comes 
before the public; they judge by a literary standard 
that is becoming superseded; they are out of touch 
with the movements of the advancing party; they 
often maintain a sound aesthetic tradition, but they 
are slow to amend or enlarge their laws in accordance 
with new feelings and methods ; they notice short- 
comings and irregularities, but they sometimes lack 
discernment of the very qualities which attract the 
poet's contemporaries. 1 We know that even Coleridge, 

1 An acute and very interesting dissertation on the develop- 
ment of aesthetic taste and fashion may he read in Mr. Arthur 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 15 

though he saw much beauty in Tennyson's poems, said 
that he could scarcely scan the verses, and passed upon 
them the criticism that the new poet had begun to 
write poetry without very well knowing what metre 
is. On the other hand, however, Coleridge said in his 
Table Talk (April 1830) — "Mr. Tennyson's sonnets, 
such as I have read, have many of the character- 
istic excellences of Wordsworth and Southey." It 
was long before the Quarterly Bevieiv, which began 
by treating him with contempt, could find anything 
better for Tennyson than sarcastic approbation. Yet 
the article in Blackwood, on his first volume, by " Chris- 
topher North," does show considerable discrimination, 
and on the whole, although Tennyson naturally resented 
it, must have been rather to his advantage than other- 
wise ; for the critic undoubtedly hit with sharp but not 
unkindly ridicule the marks of affectation and lavish 
ornament that belonged to the poet's immaturity. Most 
of the pieces which Blackwood condemned were rightly 
omitted in subsequent editions ; and in regard to those 
which he praised, the judgment has been generally 
upheld by later opinion. But a new writer's surest 
augury of future success is to be found in an ardent 
welcome by his contemporaries ; it is a sign that he is 
not a mere imitator, however artistic, of past models, 
that he has caught the spirit and is quickening the 
emotions of the generation with which he has to live. 
Arthur Hallam wrote enthusiastically of the Lyrical 
Poems in the Englishman's Magazine ; and in the West- 
minster Review John Bowring hailed the advent of an 
original poet, with powers that imposed upon him high 

Balfour's book on the Foundations of Belief, chap. ii. sections 
1 and 2. 



16 TENNYSON [chap. 

responsibility for the use of them. Some of the pieces 
contained in this first edition were omitted in subse- 
quent reprints, though of these several reappeared 
later; and all that Tennyson decided to preserve 
stand in the latest collective edition under the title 
of " Juvenilia." Here, again, as throughout his later 
work, we have the poet's tendency to doubts and to 
gloomy meditation on man's short and sorrowful exist- 
ence, side by side with a kind of rapturous delight in 
the beauties of nature and the glories of art. We 
have the " Confessions of a Sensitive Mind " that finds 
no comfort in creeds, and ends with the prayer for 

light — 

"Oh teach me yet 
Somewhat before the heavy clod 
Weighs on me, and the busy fret 
Of that sharp-headed worm begins 
In the gross blackness underneath," 

followed closely by the brilliant vision of Oriental splen- 
dour in the " Eecollections of the Arabian Nights," 

"Then stole I up, and trancedly 
Gazed on the Persian girl alone, 
Serene with argent-lidded eyes 
Amorous, and lashes like to rays 
Of darkness, and a brow of pearl 
Tressed with redolent ebony, 
In many a dark delicious curl, 
Flowing beneath her rose-hued zone ; 
The sweetest lady of the time, 
Well worthy of the golden prime 
Of good Haroun Alraschid." 

Verily a sight to dispel carking intellectual anxie- 
ties. It may be remarked, however, that in this 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 17 

passage, as also in the amorous lyrics to Isabel and 
Madeline, which are full of delicate voluptuousness, 
the juvenile poet is too pictorial; his way of pro- 
ducing an image of lovely woman is by enumerating 
her charms ; he describes beauty in detail as it might 
be painted, instead of describing its effects, as the 
great poets, from Homer downward, are usually 
content to do. Although Tennyson's natural artistic 
feeling corrected his earlier manner in this respect, 
3^et the propensity to be descriptive, to elaborate a 
picture as a painter works upon his canvas, remained 
throughout a leading characteristic of his poetic 
style. 

Soon after the publication of his first volume 
Tennyson made a journey to the Pyrenees, where he 
had some secret meetings with the Spanish refugees 
who, under Torrigo's leadership, were concerting the 
rash enterprise against the Spanish government that 
ended with the military execution of the whole party 
when they landed near Malaga in November 1831. 
He returned to live at Somersby, and about this time 
more verses were circulating among his friends, by 
whom, particularly by Arthur Hallam, he was urged 
to publish them. At Cambridge they received unani- 
mous Apostolic benediction, with perpetual reading 
and diverse commentaries, until they were brought 
out toward the end of 1832. The "Lover's Tale," 
written in the poet's nineteenth year, and partly 
printed, was judiciously withdrawn from this issue 
at the last moment. A long poem in blank verse, 
betraying immaturities of style which the other 
pieces showed him to have outgrown, would have 
marred, as Tennyson himself said, the complete- 



18 TENNYSON [chap. 

ness of the book, and would certainly have added 
more weight than worth to the collection. For 
this volume undoubtedly contains some of the most 
exquisite poetry that he ever wrote — " Mariana in 
the South, » " The Lady of Shalott, " and " The Pal- 
ace of Art." 

His method of producing an impression by group- 
ing details was used with great skill in these poems 
for scenic effects. In Mariana in the Moated Grange 
we see how a few Avords can take hold of and en- 
chant the fancy until it conjures np images of 
the landscape, the mournful aspect of a decaying 
house in a level waste, the chill air of gray dawn, 
the varying moods of despondency that follow the 
alternations of sun and shadow, of light and darkness, 
as they pass before a solitary watcher who looks 
vainly for some one who never comes — 

" About a stone-cast from the wall 

A sluice with blacken' d waters slept, 
And o'er it many, round and small, 
The cluster' d marish-mosses crept. 
Hard by a poplar shook alway, 

All silver-green with gnarled bark : 
For leagues no other tree did mark 
The level waste, the rounding gray. 
She only said, ' My life is dreary, 

He cometh not,' she said ; 
She said, ' I am aweary, aweary, 
I would that I were dead ! ' " 

This profusion of accurate detail in filling up the 
picture is very characteristic of Tennyson's manner, so 
different from Wordsworth's, who is usually content to 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 19 

paint the background of his figures by a few strokes. 1 
This rare power of giving atmosphere to a poem — of 
suggesting the correspondence and interaction be- 
tween the mind and its surroundings, between the 
situation and the subjective feelings — comes out 
even more forcibly in Mariana in the South, where 
we have the troubled sleep in exhaustion produced 
by intense heat, with the dream of cool breezes and 
running brooks, and the waking to consciousness of 
bare desolation — 

" She woke : the babble of the stream 
Fell, and, without, the steady glare 

Shrank one sick willow sere and small. 
The river-bed was dusty -white ; 
And all the furnace of the light 

Struck up against the blinding wall." 

To those who have been besieged and cooped up for 
many hours by the fierce sun beating against the walls 
of some dismal place of shelter, these lines will vividly 
recall a familiar sensation. 

When this poem, first published in 1832, reappeared 
ten years later, it had been almost rewritten ; but by 
comparing the two versions one can see how Tennyson 
had pruned and condensed his style, always aiming at 
greater precision, and at producing the vivid impression 
in fewer words. It may be interesting to set the two 
opening stanzas of each version side by side. 

1 For example, in "The Tables Turned— An Evening Scene," 
there is but one descriptive stanza — 

" The sun, above the mountain's head, 
A freshening lustre mellow 
Through all the long green fields has spread, 
His first sweet evening yellow." 



TENNYSON 



[chap. 



(1832) 

1 Behind the barren hills upsprung 
With pointed rocks against the 
light, 
The crag sharpshadowed overhung 
Each glaring creek and inlet 
bright. 
Far, far, one light blue ridge was 
seen, 
Looming like baseless fairyland 
Eastward a ship of burning sand, 
Dark rimmed with sea, and bare of 

green. 
Down in the dry salt-marshes stood 
That house dark-latticed. Not a 

breath 
Swayed the rich vineyard under- 
neath, 
Or moved the dusty southernwood. 
Madonna, with melodious moan, 

Sang Mariana, night and morn — 
Madonna, lo ! I am all alone, 
Love-forgotten and love-forlorn." 



(1842) 

1 With one black shadow at its feet, 
The house thro' all the level 
shines, 
Close-latticed to the brooding heat, 

And silent in its dusty vines : 
A faint-blue ridge upon the right, 
An empty river-bed before, 
And shallows on a distant shore, 
In glaring sand and inlets bright. 
But ' Ave Mary,' made she 
moan, 
And ' Ave Mary,' night and 
morn, 
And 'Ah,' she sang, 'to be all 
alone, 
To live forgotten, and love 
forlorn.' " 



In both versions the abundance of epithets is remark- 
able ; there is hardly a substantive unqualified ; but 
in the later version the description is less particular, 
and altogether much more compressed. 

The moral of The Palace of Art is the insufficiency 
of external beauty to ward off the discontent, grad- 
ually sinking into despair, that invades a soul when 
it has planned out a life of godlike isolation among 
the most perfect creations of painting, statuary, 
and architecture. Form and colour, great historical 
portraits, splendid landscapes, the purity of marble, 
the rich light pouring in through stained glass, adorn 
the Palace of Art. The working out of such a design 
strains the power of descriptive poetry to its utmost 
effort ; for here it enters into a kind of rivalry with 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 21 

the sister arts on their own ground: the poet must 
imagine images ; he is imitating Nature at second- 
hand, and is among all the snares that beset word- 
painting. Tennyson attempted, but abandoned, the 
arduous task of " doing a statue in verse " ; he struck 
out the five stanzas introducing the statues of Elijah 
and Olympias; he shortened his catalogue and weeded 
out his gallery ; and the alterations which the poem 
underwent in successive editions show the labour that 
it cost him. He thus succeeded in executing a series 
of exquisitely finished pictures, having in his mind, 
possibly, the Homeric shield of Achilles ; though the 
scenes on the shield represent movement, as on a 
temple's frieze, whereas Tennyson portrays also single 
incidents, figures, or effects of still life, as in a great 
picture gallery : — 

" And one, a full-fed river winding slow 
By herds upon an endless plain, 
The ragged rims of thunder brooding low, 
With shadow-streaks of rain. 

Nor these alone, but every landscape fair, 

As fit for every mood of mind, 
Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern, was there 

Not less than truth design'd." 

In each stanza the keynote or motif is struck with 
a masterly power of suggestion, until we return to 
what poetry alone can express — the soul's delight in 
a representation of external beauty, and finally the 
intellectual weariness and spiritual prostration of the 
soul among all this outward magnificence. 

"0 all things fair to sate my various eyes ! 
O shapes and hues that please me well ! 
silent faces of the Great and Wise, 
My Gods, with whom I dwell ! " 



22 TENNYSON [chap. 

Her godlike isolation sinks into a feeling of consterna- 
tion at her solitude — 

"As in strange lands a traveller walking slow, 
In doubt and great perplexity, 
A little before moon-rise hears the low 
Moan of an unknown sea." 

Perfection of culture, Art for Art's sake, has no deep 
root in the heart of man, and flowers but to fade 
rapidly ; it strikes a deep root only when it gives a 
moral representation of life. 

Yet nothing is more rare or difficult than the pres- 
entation of some general truth, in -prose or verse, 
by a story with inner significance, like the parables 
of a religious teacher. By symbolism, which is a more 
delicate instrument than metaphor, the second term 
of the comparison, the application of the narrative, is 
intimated but not expressed. If the meaning is vague 
or too much hidden, it is missed ; if it is brought out 
too obviously, the mysterious charm disappears. In 
The Lady of Shalott we are not far below the high- 
water mark of symbolic poetry, the art which one of 
the latest schools of French poetry has been practising 
with doubtful success, being foiled mainly by the in- 
curable lucidity and precision of the French language. 
The final version of this poem shows much less revision 
than in most of his early writings, although the careful 
pruning away of anything that might sound trivial or 
familiar is observable in such alterations as that whereby 
the Lady now writes her name " round about the prow," 
instead of " below the stern," where she wrote it origi- 
nally, and where an ordinary boatman would have 
painted it. And since The Lady of Shalott is one 
of Tennyson's masterpieces, we may select it as an 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 23 

example of his genius at a period when he had brought 
the form and conception of his poetry up to a point 
which he never afterward surpassed. 

Undoubtedly his work is throughout elaborate, in 
the sense that he meditated long over the composition, 
and spared no pains to attain perfection. Tennyson 
arranged and polished indefatigably his blank verse, 
that purely English metre which more than any other 
gives scope to scientific construction, disdaining the 
adventitious aid of rhyme. The normal line consists, 
as every one knows, of five iambics marked not only by 
quantity but also by accentuation ; and it is the mobil- 
ity of the English accent, as compared with the regu- 
larity of prosodial notation, that gives such freedom to 
English verse, and is one of the elements that combine 
to make our language so excellent for poetry. And 
the skill of the consummate artist in blank verse finds 
its triumph in the infinite variety of measured sounds 
which he can draw from a five-stringed instrument 
that seems easy to play upon, yet is droning and 
tedious in all but a few hands. 1 

The return, so noticeable in English poets of the 
nineteenth century, to the divine and heroic myths of 
ancient Greece, may be said to have begun with Keats, 
who endowed them with new life by the ardent play of 
his romantic imagination, and did it none the worse 
for his slight acquaintance with the originals. Tenny- 
son continued a similar treatment of them with much 
more accurate knowledge. The concrete and sculp- 
tured figures of the antique legend or fable, in (Enone, 
Ulysses, and Tithonus, were endued with warmth and 

iSee Chapters on English Metre, by J. B. Mayor (1886). 



24 TENNYSON [chap. 

fresh colour by becoming the impersonations of the 
impulses and affections of modern life — love unre- 
quited, lassitude, restlessness, the roaming spirit, the 
ennui of old age, philosophic ardour or serenity. 

The poem of (Enone is the first of Tennyson's elab- 
orate essays in a metre over which he afterwards ob- 
tained an eminent command. It is also the first of his 
idylls and of his classical studies, with their melodious 
rendering of the Homeric epithets and the composite 
words, which Tennyson had the art of coining after 
the Greek manner ("lily-cradled," "river-sundered," 
" dewy-dashed ") for compact description or ornament. 
Several additions were made in a later edition; and 
the corrections then made show with what sedulous 
care the poet diversified the structure of his lines, 
changing the pauses that break the monotonous run of 
blank verse, and avoiding the use of weak terminals 
when the line ends in the middle of a sentence. The 
opening of the poem was in this manner decidedly 
improved ; yet one may judge that the finest passages 
are still to be found almost as they stood in the orig- 
inal version; and the concluding lines, in which the 
note of anguish culminates, are left untouched : — 

" O mother, hear me yet before I die. 
Hear me, earth. I will not die alone, 
Lest their shrill happy laughter come to me 
Walking the cold and starless road of Death 
Uncomf orted, leaving my ancient love 
With the Greek woman." 

Nevertheless the blank verse of (Enone lacks the 
even flow and harmonious balance of entire sections in 
the Morte d' Arthur or Ulysses, where the lines are 
swift or slow, rise to a point and fall gradually, in 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 25 

cadences arranged to correspond with the dramatic 
movement, showing that the poet has extended and 
perfected his metrical resources. The later style is 
simplified; he has rejected cumbrous metaphor; he 
is less sententious ; he has pruned away the flowery 
exuberance and lightened the sensuous colour of his 
earlier composition. 

In the Lotos-Eaters we have an old Greek fable of 
wandering sailors reaching an unknown land of fruit 
and flowers ; and the poem's rich long-drawn melody, 
with its profusion of scenic description, is in strong 
contrast to the quiet line and feeling of the Homeric 
narrative ; where the impression is created by describ- 
ing, not the environment, but its effect upon the men. 
"Whosoever did eat the honey-sweet fruit of the lotos 
had no more wish to bring tidings nor to come back, 
but there he chose to abide with the lotos-eating men, 
ever feeding on the lotos, and forgetful of his home- 
ward way." Out of this the modern poet creates a 
splendid choric song, of way-worn mariners overcome 
by dreamy languor in a beautiful island, to whom their 
homes and their fatherland are becoming no more than 
a far-off memory. It may be that the ancient myth is 
a marvellous tradition of some real incident, when a 
shipwrecked crew settled down upon some island in 
a climate and among a people not unlike those which 
were discovered by the first European adventurers in 
the South Pacific Ocean ; for even in the story of the 
Mutiny of the Bounty we can trace the influence of 
lotos-eating upon British sailors. The concluding 
strophe of the Ode as it now stands was substituted in 
1843 for lines of a different structure and very inferior 
merit. The gods of Epicurus are the proper divinities 



26 TENNYSON [chap. 

of the lotos-eaters ; they look down carelessly through 
the clouds at the strife and misery of the world — 

"Over wasted lands, 
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and 

fiery sands, 
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and 

praying hands." 

In the picture of luxurious repose as the ultimate bliss 
attainable both in this world and in heaven we have 
the shadow of the earth projected on the sky; it is 
that natural reflection of human experience and desires 
which is the common source of all primitive concep- 
tions of a future existence. 

The Quarterly Review l noticed these poems in a sar- 
castic article (by Kinglake, the author of Eothen) that 
missed all the beauties, yet hit the blots. That the 
criticism, although short-sighted enough as an appre- 
ciation, was yet salutary, is proved by the corrections 
afterwards made by Tennyson in passages where the 
thin partition that divides simplicity from triviality 
had been overstepped, or where the metre had not yet 
attained the strength and sure harmonic tones of his 
later workmanship. These old-fashioned reviewers, 
like the headmasters who ruled great public schools 
by incessant castigation, laboured honestly in their 
vocation of maintaining the classic traditions; and 
there was a masculine common-sense in their disci- 
pline that was by no means unwholesome. But for an 
example of impenitent conservatism and of insensi- 
bility to true genius, because it was new, the following 
sentence taken from an article in the Quarterly Review 2 
upon the poems of Monckton Milnes is not easily to 
be matched : — 

1 1839. 2 zbicl. 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 27 

" We are quite sure that he [Milnes] will hereafter obey 
one good precept in an otherwise doubtful decalogue : — 

' Thou shalt believe in Milton, Dry den, Pope,' 

and regret few sins more bitterly than the homage he has 
now rendered at the fantastic shrines of such baby idols as 
Mr. John Keats and Mr. Alfred Tennyson." 

We have here the men who adore the great image of 
authority, and denounce all novelties as heretical. The 
reviewer adopts Byron's creed, but overlooks Byron's 
own triumphant desertion of it; for in his finest poems 
there is no trace of the great masters whom Byron 
professed to worship. He received a well-merited 
rebuke from J. S. Mill, who wrote in the London Hevieiu 
(1835) an article condemning the short-sighted incom- 
petency of the Quarterly's critic, recognising Tennyson 
as a true artist of high promise, and passing upon The 
Lady of Shalott a judgment in which the present 
writer ventures entirely to agree : — 

" Except that the versification is less exquisite, ' The 
Lady of Shalott' is entitled to a place by the side of the 
'Ancient Mariner' and ' Christabel.'" 

For it should not have been difficult to perceive that 
in this second volume of poems the promise and 
potency of Tennyson's genius were clearly visible, and 
that the ascent was gradual because the aims were 
high. The blemishes often signified no more than 
exuberant strength ; and James Montgomery's observa- 
tion of him at this stage is generally true as a stand- 
ing test of latent powers in a beginner : — 

" He has very wealthy and luxurious thought and great 
beauty of expression, and is a poet. But there is plenty of 
room for improvement, and I would have it so. Your trim 



28 TENNYSON [chap. 

correct young writers seldom turn out well. A young poet 
should have a great deal which he can afford to throw away 
as he gets older." 1 

Although Tennyson's father died in 1831, he 
remained with the family at Somersby Rectory until 
1837, making occasional visits elsewhere, to Mable- 
thorpe on the bleak Lincolnshire coast, to London, and 
once crossing the sea to Holland for a journey up the 
Rhine to Cologne and Bonn. It was a tumultuous 
period in Continental no less than in English politics ; 
and though Tennyson welcomed the Reform movement 
at home, he was in some trepidation lest it might open 
the floodgates of democracy upon the foundations 
of ancient institutions. "The instigating spirit of 
Reform," he wrote, " will bring on the confiscation of 
Church property, and may be the downfall of the 
Church altogether ; but the existence of the sect of St. 
Simonists in France is at once a proof of the immense 
mass of evil that is extant in the nineteenth century, 
and a focus which gathers all its rays." 2 His hope of 
never seeing " St. Simon in the Church of Christ " has 
at any rate been amply fulfilled ; and the mere appre- 
hension shows that he had not yet, naturally, measured 
the difference between a religion and a scientific phi- 
losophy, or the former's incalculable superiority in the 
domain of things spiritual. In religion, as in politics, 
Tennyson's convictions gradually settled down into a 
hopeful optimism, occasionally shaken by fits of 
splenetic doubt and of discomfiture at the spectacle of 
human errors and misery. He believed in the remote 
eventual perfectibility of creeds and also of constitu- 
tions ; but about this time the vanward clouds were 
1 Memoir. 2 Ibid. 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 26 

gathering on the political horizon, and he was never 
without some fear lest society might be caught unpre- 
pared in some sudden storm : — 

" Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher, 
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire." 

This habit of cautious moderation and profound 
distrust of popular impatience, the dislike of excess 
or audacity in opinion which belongs to the contem- 
plative artist, possessed Tennyson from youth to age, 
and occasionally lowered the temperature of his verse. 
Yet Tennyson, like Burke, had great confidence in the 
common-sense and inbred good-nature of the English 
people. Stagnation, he once said, is more dangerous 
than revolution. As he was throughout consistently 
the poet of the via media in politics, the dignified con- 
stitutional Laureate, so he was spared the changes that 
passed over the opinions of Wordsworth, Southey, and 
Coleridge, who were Radicals in their youth, and 
declined into elderly Tories. The temper of the times 
affected his poetry in a contrary way ; for his ardour 
rather increased with his age. He attained manhood 
in the middle of the calm period that followed the 
long, tumultuous years when all Europe was one vast 
battlefield, when the ardent spirits of Byron and 
Shelley had been fired by the fierce rallying of the 
European nations against Napoleon. It was the 
Crimean War, twenty years later, that first brought 
out Tennyson upon the battlefield ; while at home the 
subsidence of violent Radicalism encouraged his Lib- 
eral attitude toward internal politics. 

In the autumn of 1833 came the news that Arthur 
Hallam, his dearest friend, who had been engaged to 



30 TENNYSON [chap. 

Emily Tennyson, had died suddenly at Vienna, his 
last letter to Tennyson being dated a week before his 
death. Arthur Hallam may be counted among those 
men whom the unanimous consent of all their fellows 
marks out for high future distinction, and whose 
brilliant opening upon life, closed abruptly by early 
death, invests their memory with a kind of romance, 
explaining and almost justifying the antique concep- 
tion of Fate and divine envy. Tennyson's heart was 
pierced with bitter sorrow, and filled with a sense of 
life's dreary insignificance. He wrote the first sec- 
tions of his famous elegy upon his friend, and began 
that poem, The Two Voices, which takes up again the 
ancient strain of mortal man wrestling with the tempta- 
tion to despair, when irremediable misfortune seems 
to render life nothing worth, a momentary existence 
destined to vanish into the cold oblivion that hides so 
many generations of the past. 

The Memorial poem underwent many years of incu- 
bation. In the meantime Tennyson's mind was also 
on other poetic subjects. Sir Henry Taylor published 
in 1834 his drama of Philip van Artevelde, with a 
preface containing the author's views upon modern 
poetry in general, and some criticisms upon Byron and 
Shelley in particular. The essence of his dissertation 
was that " poetry is Eeason self-sublimed," that 
Byron's verse was too unreasonably passionate, the 
product of personal vanity unbridled by sober sense 
and study ; and that Shelley let his fancy run riot in 
melodious rhapsodies. It was the somewhat austere 
judgment of a cultured intellect upon the romantic 
revival, which was representing the demand for liberty 
and a wider range of ideas in art, as the Liberal move- 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 31 

ment did in politics, among the poets whom Taylor 
designated as the Phantastic school. Tennyson's 
observation upon these criticisms is just and far- 
seeing : — 

" I close with Taylor in most that he says of modern po- 
etry, though it may be that he does not take sufficiently into 
consideration the peculiar strength evolved by such writers 
as Byron and Shelley, who, however mistaken they may be, 
did yet give the world another heart and new pulses, and so 
we are kept going. Blessed be those who grease the wheels 
of the old world, insomuch that to move on is better than 
standing still." 1 

No man, as we know, was less disposed than 
Tennyson to undervalue intellectual serenity or rhyth- 
mic perfection ; yet he saw that Byron, with the fiery 
impetus of his careless verse, and Shelley, with his 
strong-winged flights into the realms of phantasy, 
were men of daring genius who had quickened the 
pace and widened the imaginative range of English 
poetry. 

During these years Tennyson was living in retire- 
ment at Somersby. His correspondence, then and 
always, appears to have been so rare and fitful that it 
creates a serious difficulty for the ordinary biographer, 
who misses the connected series of letters that provide 
so important and interesting a clue to be followed in 
tracing the incidents, the opinion on passing events, 
the interchange of literary and political impressions, 
in the lives of illustrious or notable men. For paucity 
of correspondence Tennyson is indeed singular among 
modern English poets. Cowper, Scott, and Byron 
stand in the foremost rank of our letter-writers, and 
their correspondence is in volumes; while Matthew 
1 Memoir. 



32 TENNYSON [chap. 

Arnold has actually predicted that Shelley's letters 
might survive his poems. Coleridge's familiar letters 
are amusing, pathetic, and reflective, full of a kind 
of divine simplicity ; he is alternately indignant and 
remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and 
sinks anon to the confession of his errors and embar- 
rassments. Wordsworth's letters contain rural scenery 
and lofty moral sentiment. They all belonged to the 
rapidly diminishing class of eminent men who have 
freely poured their real sentiments and thoughts out 
of their brain into correspondence with friends, giving 
their best without keeping back their worst, so that 
we can follow the stages of their lives and thoughts ; 
and the letters thus preserve for us the clear-cut 
stamp of their individuality. The occasional letters 
of Tennyson given in the Memoirs are characteristic 
and entertaining, thrown off usually in the light play 
of wit and good-humour; but for early glimpses of 
him we have to rely mainly upon the letters or remi- 
niscences of his friends. In 1835 he was with the 
Speddings in the Lake country, where he met Hartley 
Coleridge, who, " after the fourth bottom of gin, delib- 
erately thanked Heaven for having brought them ac- 
quainted," x and wrote a sonnet in celebration thereof. 
A visit to Wordsworth at Bydal Mount he would not 
then be persuaded to undertake, though the Laureate 
of the day and his successor did come together at a 
dinner party a few years later. Mr. Aubrey de Yere 
has described the meeting ; 2 and he has told us that 
Wordsworth soon afterwards wrote in a letter to a 
friend that Tennyson was " decidedly the first of our 
living poets." In connection with this incident Mr. 
1 Memoir. 2 Ibid. 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 33 

de Vere is reminded of a conversation with Tennyson, 
who was enthusiastic over the songs of Burns — " You 
forget, for their sake, those stupid things, his serious 
pieces." The same day Mr. de Vere met Wordsworth, 
who praised Burns even more vehemently than Tenny- 
son had done, but ended — " Of course, I refer to his 
serious efforts; those foolish little amatory songs of 
his one has to forget." 

After 1837 the Tennyson family changed their resi- 
dence more than once, first migrating from Somersby 
to High Beech in Epping Forest, and thence in 1840 
to Tunbridge Wells. Tennyson made various excur- 
sions about England ; and at Warwick he met again 
FitzGerald, who had been with him in the Lake coun- 
try, when they visited together Kenilworth and Strat- 
ford-on-Avon, where Tennyson, seized with enthusiasm, 
wrote his name among those scribbled all over the 
room in which Shakespeare was born — "a little 
ashamed of it afterwards." He came by Coventry to 
London, and composed Godiva, of which Charles 
Sumner, the American, wrote to Monckton Milnes 
that it was " unequalled as a narrative in verse " ; he 
also went to Bolton Abbey and North W T ales, leading 
a tranquil and contemplative life in a period of politi- 
cal and ecclesiastical agitation, sedulously husbanding 
his powers, meditating on the problems of existence, 
and collecting impressions in his journeys about Eng- 
land. He was far from being indifferent to current 
politics or theological controversies; he took a close 
interest in the Oxford Movement ; nor did he make 
light of the grievances and demonstrations of the 
Chartists. Yet his attitude seems to have been that 
of the philosophic spectator who surveys from a height 



34 TENNYSON [chap. 

the field of action ; he did not fling himself into the 
fighting line, like Byron or Shelley, whose poetry 
glows with the fiery enthusiasm of combatants in the 
strife over political or religions causes and ideas, or 
like Coleridge, who declared that all the social evils 
of his day arose from a false and godless empiricism, 
and anxiously expounded to Lord Liverpool the essen- 
tial connection between speculative philosophy and 
practical politics. 1 The two short poems that were 
suggested (we are told) by the Reform agitation are 
in a tone of moderate conservatism : he praises the 
freedom that slowly broadens down from precedent to 
precedent ; he despises the " falsehood of extremes " ; 
and just as in Locksley Hall may be noticed a listen- 
ing fear of mob rule, so in his poem Love thou thy 
Land, he is a cautious Liberal, ready to do much for 
the people, but very little by the people — 
" But pamper not a hasty time, 
Nor feed with crude imaginings 
The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings, 
That every sophister can lime " — 

and his abhorrence of precipitate politics comes out in 
almost every allusion to France. 

In his religious speculations he ponders over the 
question why God has created souls, knowing that 
they would sin and suffer, and finds it unanswerable 
except in that firm hope of universal good as the out- 
come, which is the reasoned conclusion of those who 
find the design of human life in this world unintelli- 
gible, unless another world is brought in to redress 
the balance, and which is thus the mainspring and 
support of belief in a future existence. There are 

1 See a wonderful letter in Lord Liverpool's Life, vol. ii. p. 302. 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 35 

passages in the letters written about this time to Miss 
Emily Sellwood, during the long engagement that pre- 
ceded their marriage, that indicate the bent of his 
mind toward philosophic questions, with frequent 
signs of that half -con scions fellow-feeling with natu- 
ral things, the " dim, mystic sympathies with tree and 
hill reaching far back into childhood," that sense of 
life in all sound and motion, whereby poetry is drawn 
upward, by degrees and instinctively, into the region 
of the higher Pantheism. " Sculpture," he writes, 
" is particularly good for the mind ; there is a height 
and divine stillness about it which preaches peace to 
our stormy passions." 1 Nor has any English poet 
availed himself more skilfully of a language that is 
rich in metaphors consisting of words that so far 
retain their primary meaning as to suggest a picture 
while they convey a thought. 

The preservation of the rough drafts and rejected 
versions of passages and lines in poems of high finish, 
for the purpose of showing the artist at work, may not 
be altogether fair to him, and the practice in some 
recent editions of giving them in footnotes is rather 
distracting to those readers who enjoy a fine picture 
without asking how the colours are mixed. And 
when each page of fine verse is also garnished with 
references, with minute explanations of the most 
familiar allusion, and with parallel quotations from 
other standard poets, the worried reader is painfully 
reminded of his early school-books. Tennyson's 
poems have never yet been footnoted in this fashion, 
although no poet has corrected or revised more 
diligently; but the successive editions, which bear 
1 Memoir. 



36 TENNYSON [chap. 

witness to his alterations, have been studiously com- 
pared more than once. To students of method, to the 
fellow-craftsman, and to the literary virtuoso, the 
variant readings may often be of substantial interest 
for the light they throw on the tendencies and predi- 
lections of taste which are the formative influences 
upon style in prose or poetry. It is from such mate- 
rials that one can follow the processes of Tennyson's 
composition, the forming and maturing of his style, 
the fastidious discrimination which dictated his rejec- 
tion of any work that either did not throughout satisfy 
a high standard, or else marred a poem's symmetrical 
proportion by superfluity, overweight, or the undue 
predominance of some note in the general harmony. 
One may regret that some fine stanzas or lines should 
have been thus expunged, yet the impartial critic 
would probably confirm the decision in every instance. 
He acted, as we perceive, inexorably upon his rule that 
the artist is known by his self-limitation, feeling cer- 
tain, as he once said, that "if I mean to make any 
mark in the world, it must be by shortness, for 
the men before me had been so diffuse." Only the 
concise and perfect work, he thought at this time, 
would last ; and " hundreds of verses were blown up 
the chimney with his pipe smoke, or were written 
down and thrown into the fire as not being perfect 
enough." 1 Not many poems could have spared 
the four stanzas with which the " Dream of Fair 
Women" originally began, and which E. FitzGerald 
quotes in an early letter as in Tennyson's " best style, 
no fretful epithet, not a word too much." It opens 
thus : — 

i Memoir. 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 37 

" As when a man that sails in a balloon, 

Down-looking sees the solid shining ground 

Stream from beneath him in the broad blue noon, 
Tilth, hamlet, mead, and mound : 
******* 

So, lifted high, the poet at his will 
Lets the great world flit from him, seeing all, 

Higher, thro' secret splendours mounting still, 
Self -poised, nor fears to fall." 

Yet one can see that the simile is unnecessary, and to 
a certain degree out of line with the general conception 
of a vision that passes in the night. He would strike 
out stanzas because they made a poem too " long- 
backed " ; and he resolutely condemned to excision 
from the original Palace of Art some excellent verses, 
merely to give the composition even balance, and to 
trim the poem like a boat. This poem, in fact, was in 
a large part rewritten, for Tennyson evidently thought 
that too much brilliancy and opulence in the decoration 
of his Palace might run into gorgeousness. He with- 
drew two or three such stanzas as this : — 

" With piles of flavorous fruit in basket-twine 
Of gold, upheaped, crushing down 
Musk-scented blooms, all taste, grape, gourd, or pine 
In bunch, or single grown." 

And this other stanza may have been omitted because 
the didactic or scientific note is rather too prominent : — 
"All nature widens upward. Evermore 
The simpler essence lower lies, 
More complex is more perfect, owning more 
Discourse, more widely wise." 

At any rate, the preservation of these rejections (in 
the Memoir) serves to illustrate the gradual develop- 
ment of consummate technique ; nor has it in this 



38 TENNYSON [chap. 

instance damaged the artist, for we may rank Tenny- 
son among the very few poets whose reputation would 
rather gain than suffer by the posthumous appearance 
of pieces that the author had deliberately withheld or 
withdrawn. 

From 1833 the publication of more poetry was sus- 
pended, though not the writing of it. In one of 
E. FitzGerald's letters (March 1842) we have the 
following passage : — 

11 Poor Tennyson has got home some of his proof-sheets, 
and now that his verses are in hard print, he thinks them 
detestable. There is much I had always told him of — his 
great fault of being too full and complicated — which he 
now sees, or fancies he sees, and wishes he had never been 
persuaded to print. But with all his faults, he will publish 
such a volume as has never been published since the time of 
Keats, and which, once published, will never be suffered to 
die. This is my prophecy, for I live before Posterity." 

And indeed the fallow leisure of this period bore an 
ample harvest ; for after an interval of ten years the 
full growth and range of his genius came out in the 
two volumes of 1842. The first of these contained a 
selection from the poems of 1830, with others, much 
altered, which had appeared in 1832, and several new 
pieces. In the second volume all was entirely new, 
except three stanzas of " The Day Dream." 

" This decade," writes his biographer, " wrought a marvel- 
lous abatement of my father's real fault — the tendency, 
arising from the fulness of mind which had not yet learned 
to master its resources freely, to overcrowd his compositions 
with imagery, to which may be added over-indulgence in the 
luxury of the senses." 1 

The criticism is just, for these new poems did undoubt- 
edly attest the poet's rapid development of mind and 
1 Memoir. 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 39 

methods, the expansion of his range of thought, his 
increasing command over the musical instrument, and 
the admirable vigour and beauty that his composition 
was now disclosing. He had the singular advantage, 
rarely enjoyed so early in a poetic career, of being sur- 
rounded by enthusiastic friends who were also very 
competent judges of his work, whose unanimous ver- 
dict must have given his heart real confidence ; so that 
the few spurts of cold water thrown on him by pro- 
fessional reviewers no longer troubled him seriously. 
The darts of such enemies might hardly reach or 
wound one round whom such men as Hallam, James 
Spedding, Edward FitzGerald, the two Lushingtons, 
Blakesley, and Julius Hare rallied eagerly. Words- 
worth, who at first had been slow to appreciate, having 
afterwards listened to two poems recited by Aubrey 
de Vere, did " acknowledge that they were very noble 
in thought, with a diction singularly stately." Even 
Carlyle, who had implored the poet to stick to prose, 
was vanquished, and wrote (1842) a letter so vividly 
characteristic as to justify, or excuse, another quotation 
from the Memoir : — 

" Dear Tennyson, — Wherever this find you, may it 
find you well, may it come as a friendly greeting to you. I 
have just been reading your Poems ; I have read certain of 
them over again, and mean to read them over and over till 
they become my poems ; this fact, with the inferences that 
lie in it, is of such emphasis in me, I cannot keep it to my- 
self, but must needs acquaint you too with it. If you knew 
what my relation has been to the thing call'd English 
1 Poetry ' for many years back, you would think such fact 
almost surprising ! Truly it is long since in any English 
Book, Poetry or Prose, I have felt the pulse of a real man's 
heart as I do in this same. 



40 TENNYSON [chap 

" I know you cannot read German : the more interesting 
is it to trace in your ' Summer Oak ' a beautiful kindred to 
something that is best in Goethe ; I mean his ' Mullerinn ' 
(Miller's daughter) chiefly, with whom the very Mill-dam 
gets in love ; tho' she proves a flirt after all and the thing 
ends in satirical lines ! Very strangely too in the ' Vision 
of Sin ' I am reminded of my friend Jean Paul. This is not 
babble, it is speech ; true deposition of a volunteer witness. 
And so I say let us all rejoice somewhat. And so let us all 
smite rhythmically, all in concert, ' the sounding furrows ' ; 
and sail forward with new cheer, 'beyond the sunset,' 
whither we are bound." 

The allusion at the end of his letter is, of course, 
to Tennyson's Ulysses, which Carlyle quoted again 
(1843) in Past and Present. He is recalling the con- 
cluding lines of this grand monologue, where the old 
warrior, who embodies the spirit of heroic adventure 
in the primitive world, and whose manhood has been 
spent in twenty years' war and travel, breaks away 
from the monotonous inactivity of life on a small 
island, and fares forth again as a sea-rover. The 
Odyssey and the Iliad are the unsurpassed models of 
all true epical narrative ; the poet chooses certain 
incidents and actions that bring out character, that 
unite to frame a coherent picture of men and their 
times ; and when the plot has been worked out to its 
denouement, the story in each poem, as also in Milton's 
Paradise Lost, drops naturally to a quiet ending; to 
go further would have been a breach of the poem's 
unity. Yet the stamp of character is so firmly set 
upon Ulysses that the mind of man has never since 
been content with leaving him to a home-keeping old 
age in Ithaca; and one would almost as soon believe 
that Napoleon might have settled down placidly in 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 41 

Elba or St. Helena. Dante takes np, in the spirit of 
the age that produced Marco Polo, the post-Homeric 
legend of Ulysses sailing from Circe's island, near 
Gaeta, out of the Mediterranean westward into the 
"unpeopled world" of the Atlantic Ocean, impelled 
by an ardent desire to explore the unseen and un- 
known. 1 On the other hand, Tennyson's hero has 
reached home, and has given family life a fair trial, 
but he finds it so dull that he is soon driven by sheer 
ennui to his ship, purposing to sail beyond the sunset 
and return no more. He exhorts his old comrades, as 
in Dante, to follow knowledge and make the most of 
the short life remaining to them all. As a point of 
minor criticism, it may here be noticed that in taking 
Ithaca instead of Circe's island as the place of depar- 
ture on this final voyage, the English poet may have 
forgotten that before the Homeric Ulysses landed in 
Ithaca, a solitary man, every one of his companions 
with whom he left Troy had perished by sea or land 
during the long wandering. But fidelity to the origi- 
nal tradition is of no account in a poem that is inde- 
pendent of time and place. Our poet may have felt 
that he was touching a chord in the heart of the rest- 
less Englishman, who is seldom content with leisurely 
ease after many years of working and wandering 
abroad — 

1 This legend is partly confirmed, in a curious way, by careful 
recent investigations into the Mediterranean geography of the 
Odyssey, which have located, with much probability, the island of 
Calypso, the daughter of Atlas, on the north-west coast of Africa, 
near the Strait of Gibraltar. It is noticed, among other indications, 
that Calypso enjoined Ulysses to keep the north star always on his 
left in sailing back toward Ithaca, and that he followed this east- 
ward course for eighteen days. 



42 TENNYSON [chap. 

" The long mechanic pacings to and fro, 
The set gray life, and apathetic end," 

are not for men of this temper. Whether they are 
chiefs of a petty Greek island, or citizens of a vast 
empire whose frontiers are constantly advancing, for 
them it is true that 

' ' All experience is an arch wherethro' 
Gleams that untravell'd world, whose margin fades 
For ever and for ever when I move ; " 

and Ulysses is the primeval type of the indefatigable 
rover for whom the Juventus Mundi provided un- 
limited regions of adventure, but whose occupation 
will soon be gone when the uttermost corners of the 
earth shall have been explored. Ancient myth, 
mediaeval epic, popular ballads, retain and hand down 
the figures of such men, as they were stamped on the 
imagination of the times ; and Tennyson's poem gives 
us the persistent character, blended with and accorded 
to modern feelings. 

Ulysses is perhaps the finest, in purity of composi- 
tion and in the drawing of character, among Tenny- 
son's dramatic monologues. Of his other classical 
studies, Tithonus is one of the most beautiful concep- 
tions of the mythologic Greek mind reset in harmoni- 
ous verse — a fable that may be interpreted variously ; 
whether of the desolate sadness that would be the 
penalty of surviving, the mere relic of a man, into a 
strange and distant generation — 

" A white-hair'd shadow roaming like a dream," 

or as a parable upon the melancholy futility and dis- 
appointment that may follow the coupling of blooming 
youth with extreme old age. 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 43 

" How can my nature longer mix with thine ? 
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold . 
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet." 1 

On the other hand, it is " the passionless bride, divine 
Tranquillity," whom Tennyson's Lucretius, wrestling 
with the satyr, vainly woos on earth, preferring at 
last to seek her by death in the high Roman fashion, 
and trusting that 

" My golden work in which I told a truth 
That stays the rolling Ixionian wheel, 
And numbs the Fury's ringlet-snake, and plucks 
The mortal soul from out immortal hell, 
Shall stand," 

as assuredly it has stood and will endure. In these 
dramatic studies from the antique the single Roman 
figure is Lucretius, the only Latin poet who boldly 
grappled with those profound religious and philosoph- 
ical enigmas that were always perplexing Tennyson's 
meditations, and whose conclusions must have been no 
less deeply interesting to him because they were so 
different from his own. 

The march of blank verse, flowing onward with its 
sonorous rhythm, is well suited to these monologues. 
Tennyson, who believed that " Keats, with his high 
spiritual vision, would have been, had he lived, 
the greatest of us all," 2 observed also that his blank 
verse lacked originality of movement. It is true that 

1 Compare the Spanish epigram on a rainy dawn — 

"Quando sale la Aurora 
Sale llorada, 
Pobrecita, que noche 
Habra pasada ! " 

2 Memoir. 



44 TENNYSON [chap. 

Keats, who died before his metrical skill could be 
perfected, followed evidently the Miltonic construc- 
tion ; nevertheless, he stands in the foremost rank, if 
not first, among the nineteenth-century poets who 
may be said to have refreshed blank verse by a new 
exhibition of its resources for varied harmonies. And 
we may recognise an affinity, in cadence and rich 
colouring, between the first part of Hyperion and 
Tennyson's compositions in the same metre, whenever 
he takes for his theme some legend of antiquity. We 
may reckon, moreover, Keats as Tennyson's forerunner 
in the romantic handling of classic subjects, with a 
fanciful freedom not restrained by the scholarship 
that kept Tennyson closer to his models, and made 
him aim at preserving more closely the thought, to 
the extent of occasionally reproducing the very form 
and translating the language, of the Greek originals. 1 
Both poets had the gift of intense susceptibility to the 
beauties of Nature, and with both of them the primi- 
tive myths were coloured by the magic of romance. 
But Tennyson's art shows more plainly the influence 
of a time that delights in that precision of details 
which the eighteenth-century poetry had avoided, pre- 
ferring elegant generalities and elevated sentiments 
in polished verse. His work is essentially picturesque, 
in the sense that he could use words as the painter 
uses his brush for conveying the impression of a 
scene's true outline and colour ; he can venture 
upon accurate description. The subjoined fragment, 
written on revisiting Mablethorpe, contains the quin- 
tessence of his descriptive style ; the last three lines 
are sheer landscape painting. 

!" Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy." 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 45 

" Here often when a child I lay reclined : 

I took delight in this fair strand and free ; 
Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind, 

And here the Grecian ships all seem'd to be. 
And here again I come, and only find 

The drain-cut level of the marshy lea, 
Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind, 

Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea." 

So also in The Palace of Art the desolate soul is 
likened to 

" A still salt pool, lock'd in with bars of sand ; 
Left on the shore ; that hears all night 
The plunging seas draw backward from the land 
Their moon-led waters white." 

Here every word is like a stroke of the painter's 
brush, put in to complete the sketch and to round off 
the impression ; and this, as has been already observed, 
is characteristic of all Tennyson's workmanship ; he 
does not give the effect of the scene, but the scene 
itself. For the different method of conveying to the 
mind's eye the scene through its effect, we may com- 
pare 

" In such a night 

Stood Dido with a willow in her hand 

Upon the wild sea banks, and waved her love 

To come again to Carthage." 

In the volumes of 1842 one remarkable feature of 
the new poems is the diversity of subjects and motifs. 
The second volume opens with the Morte d' Arthur, 
wherein Tennyson first tried his art upon the legends 
that are to be gathered upon the shores of old romance, 
enlarging the picture, and filling up his canvas with a 
profusion of exquisite detail, the sights and the 
sounds, the figures of the king and his knights, the 



46 TENNYSON [chap. 

ruined shrine, the lake in the full moon, the clanging 
of Sir Bedivere's armour, the ripple of the water on 
the bank. The earliest romances had none of this 
ornament; they relied on the energetic simplicity 
with which a bard might relate what was said and 
done in some tragic emergency ; their interest centred 
in the acts and incidents ; they had little care for the 
descriptive setting of their narratives in landscape or 
supplementary decoration ; their religion was miracu- 
lous and almost wholly external. Tennyson retains 
the dramatic situation, and treats it in a manner that 
satisfies the modern sensibility to deeper thoughts 
and suggestions, to the magic of scenery, to that de- 
light in bygone things which is the true romantic 
feeling in an age when enchanted swords and fairy 
queens are no longer marvellous realities, and can 
only be preserved for poetic use as mystic visions. 
Arthur and his knights have fallen in their last 
battle ; but the Round Table was " an image of the 
mighty world " in which the old order changes, giv- 
ing place to new; they have lived their time and 
done their work ; and so the legendary king vanishes, 
uncertain whither he may be going, into some restful 
Elysium. 

One feature of the collection in this volume is the 
variety of subject and character. After the Morte 
d' Arthur, the last scene of a lost epic, come two 
rustic pastorals of the present day, The Gardener's 
Daughter and Dora; the latter remarkable for its 
pathetic simplicity, without one superfluous epithet 
or streak of colour, insomuch that Wordsworth is 
recorded to have thus spoken of it — " Mr. Tenny- 
son, I have been endeavouring all my life to write 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 47 

a pastoral like your Dora, and have not succeeded." 
And FitzGerald wrote that as an eclogue it came 
near the Book of Kuth. Wordsworth's pastorals, 
though of the highest quality, are constructed dif- 
ferently from Tennyson's; he tells a plain story or 
more often relates an incident, for the purpose of 
bringing out some single note of human feeling, the 
touch of nature that makes us all akin, and upon this 
he moralises reflectively. Next after Dora follow 
three sketches of quiet strolling through English 
fields, Audley Court, Walking to the Mail, and Edwin 
Morris. The mail comes in sight, " as quaint a four- 
in-hand as you shall see — three piebalds and a roan." 
We start with Edwin Morris and his friend by the 
lake, to hear 

" The soft wind blowing over meadowy holms 

7P $£ ifc T& T# $fc $fc 

While the prime swallow dips his wing, or then 

While the gold-lily blows, and overhead 

The light cloud smoulders on the summer crag." 

All these poems lap us in the caressing air of rural 
England at its best. Turn the page, and before us is 
St. Simeon Stylites, the type of wild Oriental asceti- 
cism, praying from the top of his pillar amid rain, 
wind, and frost ; " from scalp to sole one slough and 
crust of sin," 

"Battering the gates of heaven with storms of prayer." 

The poet has leapt back out of English fields into the 
Egyptian desert. From this picture of suicidal misery 
and fierce mortification of the senses we pass abruptly 
to the idyllic love poem of the Talking Oak in an old 



48 TENNYSON [chap. 

English park ; and the next leap is again still further 
backward into the primitive world of Ulysses, the 
hard-headed fighting man, 

"strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 

With this note of heroic character in the foretime 
struck by the concluding lines of Ulysses we again 
turn over a leaf, and are confronted in Locksley Hall 
by the irresolute figure of modern youth, depressed and 
bewildered by his own inability to face the bustling 
competition of ordinary English life, disappointed in 
love, denouncing a shallow-hearted cousin, and nursing 
a momentary impulse to 

' ' wander far away, 
On from island unto island at the gateways of the day." 

Eestlessness, ennui, impatience of humdrum existence, 
set him dreaming of something like a new Odyssey. 
But the hero of Locksley Hall is no Ulysses ; the 
bonds of culture and comfort are too strong for him ; 
the project of wild adventure is abandoned as quickly 
as it is formed; he remains to console himself with 
the march of mind and the wonders of scientific dis- 
covery. The contrast of ancient and modern character 
and circumstance was probably unintentional ; but in 
noticing it we may take into account that while the 
Englishman had been crossed in love, the Ithacan had 
been remarkably successful with Circe and Calypso, 
and appears to have been always well treated by 
women, who may be overcome, like the rest of the 
world, by stalwart perseverance. The great and last- 
ing success of Locksley Hall shows the power of genius 



ii] POEMS, 1830-1842 49 

in presenting an ordinary situation poetically ; how it 
can kindle up and transform common emotions, dealing 
boldly with the facts and feelings of everyday life. 
Asa composition it has great original merit : the even 
current of blank verse is put aside for a swinging 
metre, new in English poetry, with rhymed couplets, 
passionate and picturesque, which follow one another 
like waves; each of them running directly to its 
point ; and the long nervous lines sustain the rise and 
fall of varying moods. They stand now almost exactly 
as they were written originally, with one correction 
that greatly improved what is now a singularly pow- 
erful line. 1 

That a poem which is steeped in the quintessence of 
modern sentiment — an invective in Kousseau's vein 
against a corrupt society — should be connected by 
origin with the early poetry of the Arabian desert, is 
a notable example of the permanence and transmission 
of forms. We know from the Memoir that Tennyson 
took his idea (he said) of Locksley Hall from the 
MoaUaMt, the Suspended poems, composed by Arab 
bards in or about the seventh century of our era, and 
hung up in the Temple at Mecca. They are on differ- 
ent themes, but all of them begin with what is called 
the naslb, & melancholy reflection on deserted dwellings 
or camping-grounds, that once were the scene of love 
and stolen meetings. Here we have the opening prel- 
ude of Locksley Hall ; and in the first of the seven 
poems is to be found the allusion to the Pleiades with 
its metaphor ; while other resemblances can be traced 

1 ''Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change" 
(1842) altered to 

" Let the great world spin for ever," etc. 
a 



50 TENNYSON [chap. 

in the mother's worldly counsel to her daughter, and in 
the ending of both pieces with a storm. 1 

One might almost regard The Two Voices as con- 
tinuing in a deeper philosophic key the melancholy 
musing of Locksley Hall, and the two poems might 
then be labelled "Dejection." There is a similar dis- 
consolate protest against the vanity and emptiness of 
life ; there is the feeling of doubt and disillusion, the 
sombre self-examination; and that same vague longing 
for the battlefield as a remedy for the morbid sensibil- 
ity that haunts so many studious men, which reappears 
later in Maud. And the poem ends like In Memoriam, 
with a revival of faith and hope under the influences 
of calm natural beauty, of household affections, and 
the placid ways of ordinary humanity. It is a soothing 
doctrine, and a wholesome medicine for the moodiness 
and ailments, the weariness of mere brainwork, that 
occasionally disturb a sequestered and uneventful 
existence; though it would hardly minister to more 

1 These parallels have heen pointed out to me by Sir Charles 
Lyall, to whom all Arabic poetry is familiar, and whose own ver- 
sion of the couplet on the Pleiades is here placed side by side with 
Tennyson's stanza, for a comparison that is by no means to the 
disadvantage of the Arabian. It may be observed that the metrical 
arrangement of the original Arabic verse, by which each long line 
is composed of two hemistichs, giving a pause in the middle, and 
each couplet is complete in itself, is not unlike the movement of 
the English verse, and may have suggested it. 

Tennyson. 
" Many a night I saw the Pleiades, rising through the mellow shade, 
Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid." 

Imra-al-Eais. 
"What time in the Eastern heavens the Pleiades clomb the sky 
Like the jewelled clasps of a girdle aslant on a woman's waist." 



ii.] POEMS, 1830-1842 51 

perilous mental diseases, or relieve the perplexities of 
Hamlet. One stanza in The Two Voices — 
" ' Consider well,' the voice replied, 
1 His face, that two hours since hath died ; 
Wilt thou find passion, pain or pride ? ' " 

recalls the masculine attitude of an age which, though 
inferior in poetic imagination, was perhaps for that 
very reason less troubled by thick-coming fancies — 

" A soul supreme in each hard instance tried, 
Above all pain, all passion, and all pride, 
The rage of power, the blast of public breath, 
The lust of lucre and the dread of death." 1 

And it is certainly refreshing, when two or three more 
pages of Tennyson's volume are turned, to find the 
spirit of undaunted faith and courage revived in the 
lofty stanzas of Sir Galahad, where the rhymes ring 
clear like strokes on a bell — a piece of consummate 
workmanship. We may compare the somewhat abject 
prostration of Stylites with the vigorous championship 
of his faith by the knight-errant — 

" My good blade carves the casques of men, 
My tough lance thrusteth sure ; 
My strength is as the strength of ten, 
Because my heart is pure." 

He stands here as a model of that purity and trustful 
piety which belong to the later conceptions of chiv- 
alry, when tales of enchantment were intermixed with 
the Christian mysteries. In the fragment of Lancelot 
and Guinevere we have the tone of the Eenaissance, 
a picture of the courteous knight and his lady love 
set in a framework of brilliant English scenery, as they 
ride through the woods in the springtide of the year. 
1 Pope's " Epistle to the Earl of Oxford." 



CHAPTER III 

THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 

From 1842 to 1845 the sojourning of Tennyson in 
various parts of England and Ireland can be traced 
from his letters, which mention, however, few personal 
incidents, and allude rarely to public affairs. One of 
these refers to a trial of the water cure at Cheltenham ; 
and in a letter of October 1844 to F. Tennyson, 
EitzGerald reports Alfred to be still there, "where 
he has been sojourning for two months, but he never 
writes me a word. Hydropathy has done its worst : 
he writes the names of his friends in water." At this 
time he had been persuaded by one Dr. Allen to put all 
his capital into a project of turning out wood-carving 
by machinery. By this whimsically rash investment 
he lost his money, a very serious blow to his prospects 
of marriage ; and he fell ill with anxiety and vexation. 1 
In 1845 Mr. Hallam had drawn Sir Robert PeeFs 
attention to Tennyson's merits and slender means, 
when Peel offered a small grant of one sum, excus- 
ing his inability to provide more at that time ; 
but Hallam treated this as inadequate. Soon after- 

i FitzGerald writes (1845) — " Dr. Allen is dead ; and A.T., hav- 
ing a life insurance and policy on him, will now, I hope, retrieve 
the greater part of his fortune again. Apollo certainly did this ; 
shooting one of his swift arrows straight at the heart of the doctor, 
whose perfectly heartless conduct certainly upset A. TVs nerves." 
52 



chap, in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 53 

wards Carlyle's solemn warning to Monckton Milnes, 
who had already been moving in the matter, that 
his eternal salvation would depend at the Day 
of Judgment on his ability to answer the question 
why he did not get a pension for Alfred Tennyson, 
appears to have been effective, for in 1845 the 
annual grant of £200 was communicated to him by 
Sir Robert Peel as "a mark of royal favour to one 
who had devoted to worthy objects great intellectual 
powers." The minister was balancing the claims of 
Sheridan Knowles, who was aged and had done his 
work, against the rising genius, when Milnes sent 
to him Locksley Hall and Ulysses ; and it was the 
reading of Ulysses by Milnes to Peel, we are told, 
that determined the recommendation, which was made 
without any kind of direct or indirect solicitation 
from the poet. He wrote to a friend : — 

" Something in that word ' pension ' sticks in my gizzard ; 
it is only the name, and perhaps would ' smell sweeter ' by 
some other. I feel the least bit possible Miss Martineauish 
about it. You know she refused one, saying she ' should be 
robbing the people, who did not make laws for themselves ' : 
however, that is nonsense. ... If the people did make laws 
for themselves, if these things went by universal suffrage, 
what literary man ever would get a lift ? it being notorious 
that the mass of Englishmen have as much notion of poetry 
as I of fox-hunting." 1 

Herein, it may be observed, Tennyson does scant 
justice to the taste and to the generosity of the Eng- 
lish people, who are at least as widely sensitive to fine 
poetry as any other modern nation, which is probably 
one reason why England has produced so much of it. 
Nor has an original genius, of strength and sincerity, 
1 Memoir. 



54 TENNYSON [chap. 

ever had cause to fear the test of universal suffrage, if 
his themes have been, as with a great poet they always 
are, of a kind that are large and deep enough to touch 
all sorts and conditions of men : since no other art 
can compare with poetry at the highest level for its 
power of winning popularity. And this is the more 
remarkable when we remember that the poet of mod- 
ern nations uses the language of a vast miscellaneous 
multitude, with complex tastes and in diverse condi- 
tions of life ; whereas the masters of antique poetry 
had for their audience some comparatively small com- 
munity, or a group of petty states and cities allied to 
them by kinship, in mind and manners alike, by whom 
the note, when sounded, was sure to be caught up. 
And so they were fortunate at first in " leaving great 
verse unto a little clan," to be preserved and handed 
down afterwards as the inheritance of all civilised 
peoples. 

It was part of Tennyson's dubitating temperament 
that he planned out his foreign travels with interior 
misgivings, and with much wavering as to purpose 
and direction. FitzGerald writes (1845) that the poet 
" has been for six weeks intending to start every day 
for Switzerland or Cornwall, he does not know which " ; 
and in 1846 we read again that he has been " for two 
weeks striving to spread his wings to Italy or Switzer- 
land. It has ended in his flying to the Isle of Wight 
for autumn." However, in August of that year he 
did cross the sea to Ostend ; and his journal of a tour 
through Belgium and up the Ehine into Switzerland 
gives jotted impressions of travel, marking his route 
and mainly recording his discomforts. He was knocked 
out of bed one morning at four o'clock to look at Mont 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 55 

Blanc without the cloudy night-cap ; " the glance I gave 
him did not by any means repay me for the trouble of 
travelling to see him," including, we may suppose, his 
disgust at the " infernal clatter of innumerable apes " 
in a Swiss hotel. Next year he was under hydropathic 
treatment in England, so much occupied with his poems 
that he suspended correspondence with friends and 
relations, wherefore the personal chronicle of this time 
is scantier than ever. He had been long meditating 
upon a social question that had been philosophically 
discussed since Kousseau's day, had been touched 
upon by Bentham and James Mill, but had never yet 
come within the sphere of practical English politics; 
and the outcome, in 1847, was his poem of The 
Princess. 

Here is a romantic tale, with the Idea of a Female 
University for its theme and plot, and for its moral 
the sure triumph of the natural affections over any 
feminine attempt to ignore them, or to work out 
women's independence by a kind of revolt from the 
established intellectual dominion of man. The Prin- 
cess repudiates a contract of marriage with a Prince 
to whom she has been betrothed in childhood, purpos- 
ing to devote herself to the higher education of her 
own sex, in order that they may be mentally prepared 
to insist upon liberty and equality. But the Prince, 
with two comrades, puts on women's clothing; and 
they enter themselves as students in a college that 
admits women only within its bounds ; they are speed- 
ily detected, as was obviously inevitable; and the 
contrabandists are scornfully expelled, as they fully 
deserved to be. The Prince's father declares war 
upon the father of the Princess to enforce the mar- 



56 TENNYSON [chap. 

riage contract ; but it is agreed to settle the quarrel 
by a combat of fifty picked warriors on either side ; 
when the Prince is beaten down in the lists, and all 
the College is turned into a hospital for the wounded 
men, most of the girl graduates being judiciously 
ordered home. The Princess remains to nurse the 
defeated Prince and to read poetry by his bedside, 
with the natural consequence that in tending him she 
is drawn to love him, abandons her University, and 
marries her betrothed. 

It is a beautiful serio-comic love-story, that has been 
treated over-seriously not only by those who dislike 
playing with a subject which is for them a matter of 
hard and earnest argument, but also by others to whom 
the poem is " the herald melody of the higher educa- 
tion of women." The logical conclusion from the 
denouement is that matrimony is better for women 
than a life exclusively devoted to the superintendence 
of a sort of nunnery, in which girls are to be trained 
and fitted to cast off the yoke of men's pretentious 
superiority. Nor indeed was the college projected by 
the Princess as an alternative or antidote to marriage, 
but only in order that, if afterwards they chose to 
wed, they might do so on equal terms of intellectual 
companionship. A solid project of educational reform 
is surrounded with fantastic circumstances of romantic 
adventure, and is made the groundwork of some very 
fine poetry ; while the substitution of women instead 
of men everywhere in the framework of college life 
and discipline gives ample room for artistic sketches 
of novel situations and costumes. The underlying 
social philosophy is, as usual, moderate and sensible : 
the supremacy of Love is temperately asserted; the 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 57 

true value of the poem is rightly made to consist in 
its decorative beauty, in some delicate delineations of 
characters, in verse of sustained musical effect, and in 
a few exquisite lyrics that vary the unrhymed metre. 
The tender melancholy of a feeling that life may be 
passing without love, of vague regrets and longings, 
has never been more sympathetically expressed than 
in the song of Tears, idle Tears, with its refrain 
of the days that are no more, and the shadow of 
mortal darkness already falling over the season of 
youth : — 

"Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 
The earliest pipe of half - awaken' d birds 
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more." 

Few know, Tennyson said long afterwards to his son, 1 
that this is a blank verse lyric ; and perhaps there is 
no better example of a metrical arrangement of words 
into musical passages, divided into stanzas by the re- 
curring cadence of each final line. Another song, The 
Splendour falls on Castle Walls, charms the ear, on 
the other hand, by harmonious assonance and dwelling 
on long-drawn rhymes. But Home they brought their 
Warrior Dead, in which (to quote Charles Kingsley) 
" the sight of the fallen hero's child opens the sluices 
of the widow's tears," is the one piece that might 
have been written by an inferior songster, and it 
has earned popularity by touching a somewhat ordi- 
nary and facile note of pathos. It resembles too 
nearly an affecting anecdote. The amorous strain 

1 Memoir. 



58 TENNYSON [chap. 

running through the whole poem indicates the under- 
current of natural passion which is sapping the whole 
edifice of female independence and self-reliance that 
the Princess has undertaken to build up on the basis 
of intellectual emancipation ; while the hard lesson 
that all the refinements of cultured civilisation are 
powerless when confronted by the primitive appeal to 
force, is taught by the eventual dissolution of the 
University amid the clash of arms. It must be ad- 
mitted that the Princess brought this catastrophe upon 
herself by the very drastic ordinance which decreed 
death to any man found within the walls of her college 
— a characteristic sample, though it may not have been 
so intended, of the quick resentment, the propensity 
toward short and sharp measures with offenders and 
enemies, that may be observed whenever women have 
risen to supreme rulership in troubled times. And the 
fact that all the illustrious types of feminine superior- 
ity cited by the Princess in her discourses, or by the 
Lady Ida in her professorial address — from the legen- 
dary Amazon down to Joan of Arc — are women re- 
nowned in war, might possibly be taken as the poet's 
subtle insinuation of female inconsistency. For the 
whole aim and educational policy of the College, if it 
was designed to promote equality between the sexes, 
should have been to denounce and depreciate the pro- 
fession of arms, because that is the immovable corner- 
stone of masculine superiority. 

The poem was materially altered and partly re- 
modelled in the four editions that followed its first 
issue ; and a line was inserted to show, as the Memoir 
tells us, that Tennyson " certainly did not mean to 
kill any one in the tournament " ; though this casts a 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 59 

shade of unreality over his description of a fierce en- 
counter with sharp steel. Some passages in which the 
scornful invectives of the Princess border too nearly 
upon scolding, 1 are also judiciously struck out; and 
six of the songs were introduced in 1850. In regard 
to the metaphors and illustrative comparisons that 
abound throughout the narrative, we may notice how 
one point in a simile brings in a picture, after the 
Homeric fashion — 

" She read, till over brow 
And cheek and bosom brake the wrathful bloom 
As of some fire against a stormy cloud, 
When the wild peasant rights himself, the rick 
Elames, and his anger reddens in the heavens." 

Here we have a reminiscence of rick-burning to 
illustrate a hot cheek; and one can see that the 
poet's mind was continually seizing, retaining, and 
coining into words the impressions of sight and 
hearing, even if he had not told us of his method. 

" There was a period in my life (he wrote in a letter) when, 
as an artist, Turner, for instance, takes rough sketches of 
landscape, etc., in order to work them eventually into some 
great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or 
five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque 
in Nature. I never put these down, and many and many a 
line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain." 2 

He proceeds to give specimens ; and he further remarks, 
most truly, that he might easily have borrowed from 

1 " Go help the half-brained dwarf, Society, 

To find low motives unto noble deeds. 

******* 
" Go, fitter far for narrower neighbourhoods, 
Old talker, haunt where gossip breeds and seethes." 

2 Memoir. 



60 TENNYSON [chap. 

the energetic language of the people expressions and 
images which the critics would have credited to the 
effort of original creative fancy, but would have con- 
demned as unreal and non-natural. For the vernacular 
speech takes its lights and shades directly from things 
visible ; 1 and in its metaphors one can detect a sur- 
vival of the primitive animism, as in Tennyson's 
instance of an old fishwife, who had lost two sons at 
sea, crying to the advancing tide — 

"Ay, roar, do, how I hates to see thee show thy white teeth." 2 

When the popular superstition becomes a literary 
device, it is quite possible to abuse the poetic license 
that invests senseless things with a kind of human 
passion, as in Kingsley's verse of " the cruel crawling 
foam." But Tennyson never overcharged his meta- 
phors in this way ; and it is certain that in language 
what is true, what has been actually said, is often 
quite as strong as what has been imagined, and that 
no more powerful words can be deliberately invented 
than those which can be suddenly wrung out of a 
man by mortal danger or some violent emotion. 

During the years 1846-50 Tennyson lived mostly at 
Cheltenham, making excursions to Cornwall and to 
Scotland, where he traversed the classic ground of 
Burns's poetry. It may be worth while to quote here 
a passage from the " Euphranor " of E. FitzGerald, 
where, in mentioning Tennyson's emotion on seeing 
" the banks and braes of bonnie Doon," he is led on to 
some striking and very sympathetic recollections of 
his friend. 

l E.g.- 

" He shall never darken my door." 
2 Memoir. 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 61 

"... The only living, and like to live, Poet I had known, 
when, so many years after, he found himself beside that 
1 bonnie Doon,' and — whether it were from recollection of poor 
Burns, or of ' the days that are no more ' which haunt us all, 
I know not — I think he did not know — but, he somehow 
' broke,' as he told me, ' broke into a passion of tears.' Of 
tears, which during a long and pretty intimate intercourse, 
I had never seen glisten in his eye but once, when reading 
Virgil — 'dear old Virgil,' as he called him — together: and 
then of the burning of Troy in the second iEneid — whether 
moved by the catastrophe's self, or the majesty of the verse 
it is told in — or, as before, scarce knowing why. For, as 
King Arthur shall bear witness, no young Edwin he, though, 
as a great Poet, comprehending all the softer stops of human 
Emotion in that Register where the Intellectual, no less than 
what is called the Poetical, faculty predominated. As all 
who knew him know, a Man at all points, Euphranor — like 
young Digby, of grand proportion and feature, significant of 
that inward Chivalry, becoming his ancient and honourable 
race ; when himself a ' Yonge' Squire,' like him in Chaucer, 'of 
grete strength,' that could hurl the crowbar further than any 
of the neighbouring clowns, whose humours, as well as of their 
betters — Knight, Squire, Landlord, and Land-tenant — he 
took quiet note of, like Chaucer himself." 

Another journey was to Ireland, where the echoes of 
Killarney inspired the bugle song in The Princess. 
The Memoir tells us that he saw much of Thackeray 
and Carlyle, among other notables. He loved Catullus 
as a poet whose form and feeling, the sweetness 
of his verse and his enjoyment of reposeful rusticity, 
attest an affinity between two cultured civilisations 
that are separated by a long interval of time, though 
the contrast of morals is often wide enough. It was 
not in Thackeray's town-bred nature to rate the Roman 
high ; yet we find him writing a handsome apology for 
having said in his haste, when Tennyson quoted to 



62 TENNYSON [chap. 

him Catullus, that he could do better himself. Carlyle 
" had opened the gates of his Valhalla to let Alfred 
in," and evidently enjoyed high discourse with him. 
Between two such men there were necessarily frequent 
argumentative collisions, their minds were predisposed 
by training and temperament to divergent views, and 
their intellectual perspective was by no means the 
same. Carlyle saw the follies and iniquities of the 
world through a lurid magnifying glass ; he prophesied 
ruin like an ancient seer, and called down the wrath 
of God upon knaves and idiots ; while Tennyson's in- 
clination was towards indulgence of human frailty, and 
hope in the slow betterment of the world. Violence in 
word or deed was to him antipathetic ; and one may 
guess that he preferred to study heroes in their quieter 
moods, in some such fits of musing as those which 
Shakespeare interjects among scenes of furious action. 
He might have given us Cromwell reflecting in a 
soliloquy upon the burden of solitary rulership, sur- 
rounded by fanatics and conspirators. An extract from 
his conversations with Mrs. Kundle Charles indicates 
one point of what Tennyson thought about Carlyle, 
" You would like him for one day, but get tired of him, 
so vehement and destructive " ; the fastidious poet 
must have found in him too much sound and fury, and 
may possibly have doubted whether it signified any- 
thing. FitzGerald says in one of his letters (1846) — 

" I met Carlyle last night at Tennyson's, and they two dis- 
cussed the merits of this world and the next, till I wished 
myself out of this, at any rate. Carlyle gets more wild, 
savage, and unreasonable every day, and I do believe will 
turn mad." 

Tennyson preferred the Odyssey to the Iliad: 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 63 

Carlyle, who liked fierce heroes, and had no objection 
as a historian to stern cruelty, though a little personal 
discomfort was intolerable to him, would probably have 
taken the other side ; but on the subject of tobacco they 
were at any rate of one mind, and on all questions they 
disputed with amicable vigour. Later on Carlyle, at 
some moment when he was more than usually sour 
and crusty, described the poet as sitting on a dunghill 
amid innumerable dead dogs ; meaning, as one may 
guess, no more than impatience with a man of rare 
intellect who seemed to him to sit dreaming on the 
shores of old romance while the State of England was 
rotten with shams and mouldy with whited sepulchres. 
But Carlyle afterwards confessed that "his own 
description was not luminous " ; and though he cared 
little for verse, yet he could quote Tears, idle Tears, 
felt the spirit of the ballad of The Kevenge, was quite 
upset when The Grandmother was read to him, and 
said towards his life's end that Alfred always from the 
beginning took the right side of every question. 1 About 
the same time FitzGerald writes of Tennyson : " He is 
the same magnanimous, kindly, delightful fellow as ever ; 
uttering by far the finest prose sayings of any one." 

It will be recollected that Arthur Hallam died at 
Vienna in 1833. Some of the sections of Tennyson's 
monumental elegy upon his friend were written 
very soon afterwards; and their number had rapidly 
increased by 1841, when Edmund Lushington first 
saw the collection and heard the poet recite some of 
them. It must have been not far from completion in 
1845, since in that year Lushington was shown the 
1 Memoir. 



64 TENNYSON [chap. 

stanzas upon his marriage with Tennyson's younger 
sister Cecilia, with which the poem is now concluded. 
Eight editions, all of them containing successive addi- 
tions and alterations, followed the first publication 
of In Memoriam in 1850, which may accordingly be 
taken as the outcome of seventeen years' meditative 
composition. Of all Tennyson's continuous poems it 
is the longest and the most elaborate ; it affected 
profoundly the minds of the generation among whom 
it appeared ; it embodies the writer's philosophy upon 
the ever-present subject of life and death, upon all 
the problems suggested by the mutability of the 
world's face and forms, and on the questions whether 
human mortality may not fall within the scope of the 
universal natural law, whether faith in things spiritual 
is a true intuition, or no more than a hopeful conjecture, 
than a painting of 

" the shadows that are beneath 
The wide winding caves of the peopled tomb." 1 

The poet, like Bunyan's pilgrim, forces his way 
through the slough of despond, passes the caverns of 
Doubt and Despair, and emerges finally into resigna- 
tion, with trust in the Unseen Power that is guiding 
all creation to some far-off divine event. In this noble 
poem — on the whole Tennyson's masterpiece — all 
natural things that catch his eye or ear remind him, 
by contrast or sympathy, of his bereavement, and 
interpret his personal emotion. Many of us know 
how the whole world seems changed and discoloured 
by some calamitous shock; and here the vivid sensi- 
bility of the poet reflects and illustrates this state of 
mind by figures, emblems, and solemn meditations, 
i Shelley. 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 65 

He is impelled by his own passionate grief to dwell 
upon the contrast between irremediable human suffer- 
ing and the calm aspect of inanimate Nature, between 
the short and sorrowful days of man and the long 
procession of ages. From the misgivings and per- 
plexities, the tendency to lose heart, engendered by a 
sense of being environed by forces that are blind and 
relentless, he finds his ultimate escape in the convic- 
tion that God and Nature cannot be at strife, that 
friends will meet and know each other again here- 
after, and that somehow good will be the final goal 
of ill. His sure and never-failing mastery of poetic 
diction, gained by practice and severe discipline, 
carries him through this long monotone with a 
high and even flight; the four lines are fitted into 
each stanza without flaws, in singular harmony ; 
the sections are complete in writing, measure, and 
balance. 

No chapter in the Memoir contains matter of higher 
biographical interest than that which is headed " In 
Memoriam." A letter from the late Henry Sidgwick, 
whose clear and intrepid spirit never flinched before 
intellectual doubts or vague forebodings, describes the 
impression produced on him and on others of his 
time by this poem, showing how it struck in, so to 
speak, upon their religious debates at a moment of 
conflicting tendencies and great uncertainty of direc- 
tion, giving intensity of expression to the dominant 
feeling and wider range to the prevailing thought. 

" The most important influence of ' In Memoriam ' on my 
thought, apart from its poetic charm as an expression of 
personal emotion, opened in a region, if I may so say, deeper 
down than the difference between Theism and Christianity : 



6(5 TENNYSON [chap. 

it lay in the unparalleled combination of intensity of feeling 
with comprehensiveness of view and balance of judgment, 
shown in presenting the deepest needs and perplexities of 
humanity. And this influence, I find, has increased rather 
than diminished as years have gone on, and as the great issues 
between Agnostic Science and Faith have become continually 
more prominent. In the sixties I should say that these deeper 
issues were somewhat obscured by the discussions on Christian 
dogma, and Inspiration of Scripture, etc. . . . During these 
years we were absorbed in struggling for freedom of thought 
in the trammels of a historical religion ; and perhaps what we 
sympathized with most in ' In Memoriam ' at this time, apart 
from the personal feeling, was the defence of ' honest doubt,' 
the reconciliation of knowledge and faith in the introductory 
poem, and the hopeful trumpet-ring of the lines on the New 
Year. . . . Well, the years pass, the struggle with what 
Carlyle used to call ' Hebrew old clothes ' is over, Freedom is 
won, and what does Freedom bring us to ? It brings us face 
to face with atheistic science ; the faith in God and Immor- 
tality, which we had been struggling to clear from superstition, 
suddenly seems to be in the air ; and in seeking for a firm 
basis for this faith we find ourselves in the midst of the ' fight 
with death ' which ' In Memoriam ' so powerfully presents." 

The whole letter, which is too long for quotation 
here, may be read in the Memoir as a fair representa- 
tion of the effect produced by In Memoriam upon 
men of sincere and sensitive minds, who resolutely 
confronted the inexorable facts of human existence, 
yet were not content to treat the problems as in- 
soluble. And so the wide impression that was made 
by these exquisitely musical meditations may be 
ascribed to their sympathetic affinity with the 
peculiar spiritual aspirations and intellectual dilem- 
mas of the time. Dogmatic theology, notwithstanding 
the famous rallying movement at Oxford, had long 
been losing ground ; liturgies and positive articles of 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 67 

religion were out of credit ; the proofs of Christianity 
by rational evidence brought religion upon the un- 
favourable ground of appeal to history and to questions 
of fact. Among average Englishmen a large number 
were willing to take morality as the chief test of 
religious truth, were disposed to hold that its essen- 
tial principles were best stated in the language of ethics. 
The Utilitarian philosophers undertook to provide 
ethics with an experimental basis ; and the researches 
of physical science threw doubt upon the actuality of 
divine intervention in the course, or even the constitu- 
tion, of the world ; they pointed to a system that was 
mechanical, though not necessarily materialistic. Then 
came, with a reaction, the energetic protests of those 
who saw and felt that Religion, which is to the vast 
majority of mankind a spiritual necessity, must not 
stand or fall by documentary evidence, must be placed 
in some region that is inaccessible to arguments from 
mere utility, that is independent of and untouched by 
the observation of phenomena or the computation of 
probabilities. Some endeavoured to show that the 
conclusions of Science could be reconciled with the 
orthodox traditions; others, as Newman, declared that 
there was no conflict at all, that theology is the high- 
est science, entirely above and unaffected by what 
used to be called natural philosophy ; but Tennyson 
saw that a serious conflict, a revolution of ideas, was 
inevitable. All speculation, physical or metaphysical, 
is necessarily affected by what we know of the world 
we live in; and the unrolling of the record of an 
immeasurable past compels us to look with new feel- 
ings on all that goes on around us. If we compare 
Tennyson with Wordsworth, we are at once aware 



68 TENNYSON [chap. 

of a marked difference in their treatment of Nature. 
Wordsworth dwells mainly upon her calm, majestic, 
and kindly aspect ; she is the homely nurse who en- 
deavours to content the immortal soul of imperial 
man with his humble abode on earth ; she is beautiful 
and beneficent; she "lifts the spirit to a calmer 
height " ; and although Wordsworth may be occasion- 
ally touched by her insensibility to human sorrow, 
may be perplexed by finding her ways unintelligible, 
yet he discerns everywhere the interfusion of a 
divine spirit, the evidences of admirable arrange- 
ment and design. For Tennyson also the external 
world was sublime and beautiful, soothing his re- 
grets and suggesting resignation to the common lot; 
but the illimitable expansion of time and space laid 
open by scientific discoveries, the record of waste 
and prodigality through countless ages, the disclos- 
ure of the processes of Nature, her impassive uni- 
formity, her implacable regularity, took strong hold 
of an imaginative mind that was in communion 
with the thought and knowledge of the day. After 
Tennyson's death Huxley wrote that he was the 
only modern poet, perhaps the only poet since Lucre- 
tius, who had taken the trouble to understand the 
work and methods of men of science; though one 
may remark that the two poets found their consola- 
tion in very different conclusions. It now seemed to 
him that the scientific men were laying claims to a 
dominion which might place in jeopardy not merely 
the formal outworks but the central dogma of Chris- 
tianity, which is a belief in a future life, in the soul's 
conscious immortality. Is man subject to the general 
law of unending mutability, and is he after all but 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 69 

the highest and latest type, to be made and broken 
like a million others, mere clay in the moulding hands 
that are darkly seen in the evolution of worlds ? The 
poet transfigured these obstinate questionings into the 
vision of 

"an ever-breaking shore 
That tumbled in the Godless deep." 

He asks : Shall man 

"Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, 
Who battled for the True, the Just, 
Be blown about the desert dust, 
Or seal'd within the iron hills ? " 

and he was haunted by the misgiving that man also 
might be no more than other atoms in the ever-chang- 
ing universe, that prayer is fruitless, that death may 
be stronger than love, and that Nature gives no inti- 
mations of conscious survival. Nevertheless her face, 
as he sees it, is so fair that it brings him consolation. 
The alternations of the seasons, the storm and the 
sunshine, are reflected in his varying moods ; the 
spring breezes carry a cheerful message, the autumnal 
gales accord with the unrest of his mind ; a quiet sea 
turns his thoughts to the calm of death. He feels the 
immemorial touch of sadness in the brief lifetime of 
flower and foliage, in the passing of the long light 
summer days ; yet beyond all these transitory images 
he looks forward to the twilight of eternal day on the 
low, dark verge of human existence, where the mys- 
teries of pain and sorrow will be understood, and no 
more shadows will fall on the landscape of the past. 
After long striving with doubts and fears, after having 



70 TENNYSON [chap. 

"fought with death," he resolves that we cannot be 
"wholly brain, magnetic mockeries" — 

1 Not only cunning casts in clay : 

Let Science prove we are, and then 
What matters Science unto men, 
At least to me ? I would not stay." 

After this manner Tennyson made his stand against 
the encroachments of Science upon the spiritual do- 
main ; though he refused to retreat, like some others, 
behind dogmatic entrenchments, and trod under foot 
the terrors of Acheron. By tight-lacing creeds, to use 
Carlyle's phrase, he would not be bound ; he believed 
firmly in some indissoluble relation between human 
destinies and a divine providence ; he reckoned the 
strenuous instinct and universal anticipation of some 
future life to be presumptive evidence of a truth ; and 
he was confident that friends would meet and know 
each other hereafter. A poem which is a long epitaph 
must naturally touch in this consolatory strain upon 
the visitations of sorrow and death ; but it must also 
remind us of the limitations, the inconclusiveness, 
that are inseparable from the emotional treatment of 
enigmas that foil the deepest philosophies. And since 
not every one can be satisfied with subjective faith 
or lofty intuitions, it may be that the note of alarm 
and despondency sounded by In Memoriam startled 
more minds than were reassured by the poet's final 
conviction that all is well 

' ' tho' faith and form 
Be sunder'd in the night of fear." 

If, therefore, the poem strengthened in many the 
determination to go onward trustfully, on the other 
hand there was an attitude of terror in the recoil from 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 71 

materialistic paths that lead to an abyss ; and perhaps 
it may be so far counted among the influences which 
have combined to promote a retreat in the latter half 
of the nineteenth century toward the shelter of dog- 
matic beliefs and an infallible authority in matters 
of religion. But whatever may have been the intel- 
lectual influences of In Memoriam, we may agree that 
it enlarged the range of poetry by entering sympa- 
thetically upon the field of these fresh doubts and 
difficulties, and by showing how a mind that in grief 
turns naturally to religion may become absorbed in 
intellectual problems. Wordsworth found content in 
the contemplation of Nature; Science he despised, 
and such questions as whether God and Nature are 
at strife did not trouble his serene philosophy. 
Tennyson's meditations were turned toward the enig- 
mas of life by the stroke of grief ; and he was thus 
led, rightly, to fulfil the poet's mission, which is to 
embody the floating thought of his period. In those 
very popular lines 

"There lives more faith in honest doubt, 
Believe me, than in half the creeds," 

we have an antithesis, a kind of paradox, that concisely 
represents the prevailing state of many minds to whom 
scientific explorations brought increasing religious per- 
plexity, until they obtained repose in the conclusion 
that essential truths lie somewhere beyond and are 
independent of all positive doctrines and formulas. 
" Our little systems have their day " ; we may believe 
where we cannot verify, and Knowledge must have her 
place as the younger child of Wisdom. The poet leads 
us to a cloudy height ; and though it is not his business 



72 TENNYSON [chap. 

to satisfy the strict philosophical enquirer, he offers to 
all wandering souls a refuge in the faith 

"that comes of self-control, 
The truths that never can be proved 
Until we close with all we loved 
And all we flow from, soul in soul." 

We know from the Memoir that Tennyson believed 
himself to be the originator of the metre of In 
Memoriam, until after its appearance he was told that 
it might be found in Elizabethan poetry and else- 
where. 1 Of the two specimens in Ben Jonson, one of 
them, the elegy Underwood, has a certain resemblance 
in movement and tone with Tennyson's shorter pieces 
in the same metre, probably because in this form the 
stanza carries naturally a certain dignity and sobriety 
of feeling, and is well suited by its measured regularity 
for compact and sententious expression. The inter- 
position of a couplet with a rhyme of its own between 
the first and fourth line, stays the pace of the verse. 
Yet the high pathetic vibrations of feeling in the finest 
passages of In Memoriam prove that in Tennyson's 
hands the instrument had acquired a wider range; 
while the main current of his meditations passes 
through so many varieties of impressions or aspects of 
nature, the dim rainy morning, the short midsummer 
night, the bitter wintry day, with moods corresponding 
to these influences, that few will agree with FitzGerald's 
objection to the poem as monotonous. 

In a little volume published in 1866 under the title 
of Temiysonia, the writer, who is an ardent admirer of 

1 A complete list of the writers who had used the metre is given 
in the commentary on " In Memoriam " by Professor A. C. Bradley 
(1901) . 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 73 

the poet, has been at the pains of pointing out, by 
parallel quotations, certain coincidences of thought 
and phrase between In Memoriam and Shakespeare's 
sonnets. Something of the kind is here and there 
faintly traceable, and the "ruined woodlands" in 
Maud might remind us of Shakespeare's likening the 
leafless trees to "bare ruined choirs, where once the 
sweet birds sang." But in Shakespeare himself, as in 
all other poets, similar reminiscences of this kind may 
be discovered, nor could they ever be rightly made an 
imputation against any great writer. FitzGerald gives 
the sound ruling on this subject in one of his letters — 
" I never speak of Plagiarism unless the Coincidence, 
or Adoption, be something quite superior to the general 
Material of him in whom the 'parallel passage' is 
found. And Shakespeare may have read the other old 
boy [Tusser] and remembered unconsciously, or never 
have read, and never remembered." The comparison 
in Tennysonia proves at most, and apparently aims at 
no more than proving, an inference that Tennyson's 
memory had assimilated the sonnets. And it is only 
of real interest when it shows occasionally how the 
ideas and impressions, which are as much the common 
property of all ages as the natural phenomena and 
human sensitiveness that produce them, are set in new 
frames by the chief artists of each succeeding time ; 
how, to quote Tennyson, the thoughts of man are 
widened by the circling of the suns. The incessant 
battle between sea and shore reminds Shakespeare that 
the solid earth, and all that it contains, are shifting 
and transitory ; while Tennyson's reflection upon the 
changes of land and water takes the vast scale of 
geologic periods — 



74 TENNYSON [chap. 

" There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 
O earth, what changes hast thou seen ! 
There where the long street roars, hath been 
The stillness of the central sea." 

The sonnets and In Memoriam have both for their 
subject the passionate attachment to a friend, living or 
dead ; and each poet turns frequently to Nature for an 
image of his emotion or a response to it. It may- 
be noticed, as a point of style, that whereas Shake- 
speare strikes off his image and fits it to his thought, 
in two or four lines, 1 the modern artist draws out a 
whole landscape, or accumulates picturesque touches — 

' ' I find no place that does not breathe 
Some gracious memory of my friend ; 

" No gray old grange, or lonely fold, 
Or low morass and whispering reed, 
Or simple stile from mead to mead, 
Or sheepwalk up the windy wold ' ' — 

prolonging the description through several stanzas. 
Both poets are profoundly impressed by Nature's 
warning to man that all her works are perishable ; but 
while Tennyson is alarmed by the sense of mortality, 
yet finds hope in some future state beyond, Shake- 
speare, with his " indolent and kingly gaze " at human 
fears and follies, propounds no reassuring speculation. 
Hamlet's last words are that the rest is silence. 

In 1836, when Charles Tennyson married Louisa 
Sellwood, her sister Emily had been one of the 
bridesmaids. To her Alfred Tennyson became soon 
afterwards engaged; but in 1840 the prospect of 

1 " Like as the waves make toward the pebbled shore, 
So do our minutes hasten to their end." 

— Sonnet LX. 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 75 

marriage appeared so remote that correspondence 
between them was broken off, and ten years passed 
before the engagement was renewed. The wedding 
took place at last in Jnne 1850, at Shiplake Church 
on the Thames, when the two became partners upon 
a very slender capital, including the expectation of a 
royalty on the published poems. They made a jour- 
ney into western England, visiting Glastonbury and 
Arthur Hallam's grave at Clevedon. A very generous 
offer from Mr. Monckton Milnes of permanent quarters 
in a wing of his house at Fryston they would not 
accept; they took a house at Warninglid in Sussex, 
but the first storm blew a hole through the wall, and 
they departed hastily, to find at last a fixed habitation 
at Chapel House, Twickenham. Their first child was 
born, but died at birth, in April 1851, after which 
they travelled into Italy, meeting the Brownings at 
Paris as they returned homeward. Under the title 
of "The Daisy," Tennyson has commemorated this 
journey in stanzas of consummate metrical harmony, 
with their beautiful anapaestic ripple in each final 
line, to be studied by all who would understand the 
quantitative value (not merely accentual) of English 
syllables in rhythmic compositions — 

"But ere we reach'd the highest summit 
I pluck' d a daisy, I gave it you. 

" It told of England then to me, 
And now it tells of Italy. 

O love, we two shall go no longer 
To lands of summer across the sea." 

Tennyson had at this time become the foremost 
poet of his day. His genius had been saluted by the 



76 TENNYSON [chap. 

applause and admiration of his contemporaries, and 
was now under the glow of its meridian. In a con- 
tribution to the Life of William Morris, 1 Canon Dixon, 
writing of Oxford in 1851-53, says : — 

"It is difficult to the present generation to understand 
the Tennysonian enthusiasm which then prevailed both in 
Oxford and in the world. All reading men were Tenny- 
sonians ; all sets of reading men talked poetry. Poetry was 
the thing ; and it was felt with justice that this was due to 
Tennyson. He had invented a new poetry, a, new poetic 
English ; his use of words was new, and every piece that he 
wrote was a conquest of a new region. This lasted till Maud, 
in 1855, which was his last poem that mattered." 

This quotation, though one may demur to the final 
words, shows Tennyson's position and the attraction 
of his poetry for the younger men ; and his general 
eminence had already been marked for public recogni- 
tion. In November 1850, after Wordsworth's death, 
the Laureateship was offered to Tennyson. Lord John 
Russell submitted to the Queen the four names of 
Leigh Hunt, Sheridan Knowles, Henry Taylor, and, 
last on the list, Tennyson. The Prince Consort's 
admiration of In Memoriam determined Her Majesty's 
choice, which might seem easy enough to the verdict 
of the present day. The subjoined extract from the 
Queen's Secretary is worth quoting, to show that the 
Laureate's duties were not intended to be burdensome, 
and that the offer was made, as the letter ended by 
saying, as a mark of Her Majesty's appreciation of 
literary distinction — 

" The ancient duties of this Office, which consisted in laud- 
atory Odes to the Sovereign, have been long, as you are 
probably aware, in abeyance, and have never been called for 

iBy J. W. Mackail (1899). 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 77 

during the Reign of Her present Majesty. The Queen how- 
ever has been anxious that the Office should be maintained ; 
first on account of its antiquity, and secondly because it 
establishes a connection, through Her Household, between 
Her Majesty and the poets of this country as a body." * 

To refuse Wordsworth's succession, proposed to him 
on such honourable terms, would have been difficult ; 
nevertheless Tennyson hesitated until his acceptance 
was determined by the right judgment of his friends. 
His accession to office brought down upon him, among 
other honoraria, " such shoals of poems that I am 
almost__crazed with them ; the two hundred million 
poets of Great Britain deluge me daily. Truly, the 
Laureateship is no sinecure. " 2 For the inevitable 
levee he was accommodated, not without disquietude 
over the nether garment, with the loan of a Court suit 
from his ancient brother in song, Samuel Rogers, who 
had declined the laurels on the plea of age. 

In 1852 the Duke of Wellington's death was the 
theme of the first verses published by the Laureate in 
discharge of his functions. It is remarkable, and to 
some it may be a consoling example of the necessary 
superficiality of day-by-day criticism, that we find 
Tennyson, in a letter thanking Henry Taylor for a 
just and discerning eulogium, writing that he is doubly 
grateful for it in the all but universal depreciation of 
his poem by the Press. Yet it is probably the best 
poem on a national event that has ever been struck off 
by a Laureate under the sudden impatient spur of the 
moment ; remembering that for a poet of established 
reputation this kind of improvisation is a serious ordeal. 
Southey could only deplore George the Third's death 
1 Memoir. 2 Ibid. 



78 TENNYSON [chap. 

in hexameters that were incontestably deplorable ; and 
Wordsworth, as Laureate, attempted nothing of the 
sort. From this point of view Tennyson's success in 
the Wellington Ode, which is well sustained at a high 
level of solemn harmony, may be reckoned unique; 
though the original version, which must have been 
rapidly composed, was amended and strengthened in 
three subsequent editions. The intermediate changes 
were not invariably for the better. Of the two lines — 

" Where shall we lay the man whom we deplore ? 
He died on Walmer's lonely shore " — 

the second line, which is perhaps the weakest that 
Tennyson ever published, was inserted in 1853, and 
most deservedly ejected in the following year. In the 
couplet — 

" Mourn, for to us he seems the last, 
Remembering all his greatness in the past," 

one misses with regret the original second line — 

" Our sorrow draws but on the golden past," 

which is stronger in sound and feeling, and must have 
been changed for the prosaic reason that sorrow for 
the dead can never draw on the present. The keynote 
of heroic character is finely given in the lines — 

"Not once or twice in our rough island-story 
The path of duty was the way to glory." 

They are repeated as the burden or lofty moral of the 
poem, and have taken rank among the quotations from 
English poetry that are familiar in our mouths as 
household words. 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 79 

The true successors of the earlier bards, who cele- 
brated in chansons cle geste and in ballads the deeds 
and death of great men or some famous national ex- 
ploit, have been, in quite modern times, poets who, 
like Campbell, Cowper, and the author of The Burial 
of Sir John Moore, spontaneously and unofficially, by 
some happy stroke of genius, seized upon some stirring 
incident of the time, and struck powerfully the right 
popular note. That this has now become generally 
assumed to be the vocation of the ideal Laureate, 
rather-than the production of courtly verse, may be 
fairly attributed in a large degree to Tennyson, who 
evidently so understood his office, for he began thence- 
forward to write poems upon heroic exploits, or the 
incidents of national war. In this spirit he composed 
The Charge of the Light Brigade, a fine rolling 
war-chant, with a thunderous echo in the dominant 
rhyme, which gained hearty applause from the British 
soldiers in the Crimea, particularly for the well-known 
line — " Some one had blundered " — that was omitted 
in the revised version of 1855. In the Defence of 
Lucknow, an incident that is famous in the annals of 
the Indian Mutiny, there are passages full of vigour and 
animation, but on the whole too much vehemence 
and tumultuous activity ; the poet endeavours to startle 
and strike the imagination by glowing pictures of the 
realities of a siege ; he accumulates authentic details, 
he tries to give us the scenes and events with the 
roar of battle, the terror and the misery, the furious 
assaults and the desperate defence, as on the stage 
of a theatre : — 

" Then on another wild morning another wild earthquake out- 
tore 



80 TENNYSON [chap. 

Clean from our lines of defence ten or twelve good paces 

or more. 
Rifleman, high on the roof, hidden there from the light of 

the sun — 
One has leapt up on the breach, crying out : 'Follow me, 

follow me ! ' — 
Mark him — he falls ! then another, and him too, and down 

goes he. 
Had they been bold enough then, who can tell but the 

traitors had won ? 
Boardings and rafters and doors — an embrasure ! make way 

for the gun ! 
Now double-charge it with grape ! It is charged and we 

fire, and they run." 

Here is abundance of fiery animation, but also too 
many descriptive particulars ; and as the whole poem 
is composed in this manner, it resembles a vivid nar- 
ration of events in pictorial prose. Such work hardly 
lies within the compass of the poetic artist, whose 
business it is to simplify and concentrate the general 
impression; and though the Defence of Lucknow 
is full of energy and ardour, one must pass upon it 
the criticism that the canvas is overcrowded and the 
verse too hurried and vehement for the ballad, or for 
the lyric of heroism, which is best when it gives a 
single tragic situation in clear outline. 

In the poetry of action Tennyson made his high- 
est score by The Kevenge : A Ballad of the Fleet ; 
although even this spirited poem, with its note of 
stately and unconquerable valour, hardly attains the 
impressive simplicity of the true ballad ; it is still too 
circumstantial. We have here a splendidly versified 
narrative of a sea-fight, with all the atmosphere of 
the winds and the waves; it is a noble chanson de 



in.] THE PRINCESS AND IN MEMORIAM 81 

geste, and the poem ends with the closing of the waters 
over the ship : — 

" When a wind from the lands they had ruin'd awoke from 

sleep, 
And the water began to heave and the weather to moan, 
And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew, 
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earthquake 

grew, 
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their masts 

ana*" their flags, 
And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shot-shatter'd 

navy of Spain, 
And the little Revenge herself went down by the island crags 
To be lost evermore in the main." 

The distance of time lends its enchantment to this 
story, and three centuries gave Tennyson the right 
prospective ; he could throw into strong relief the 
situation with its central figure, he could omit partic- 
ulars because they were unknown ; he followed per- 
force the natural instinct of popular tradition which 
preserves the broad lines of heroic character and 
achievement, leaving the rest to oblivion. Nothing is 
more rare in modern poetry than success in heroic 
verse — in the art of rendering with strength, beauty, 
and dignity the acts and emotions of men at moments 
which string up their energies to the highest pitch, 
and bring into full play the qualities of inflexible 
courage and endurance. To write of battles long ago 
is always hard enough, but in such cases romantic 
colouring is admissible, and the lapse of many years 
has luckily rubbed out all but the salient features of a 
great event or a daring exploit. When these subjects 
belong to contemporary history, to the modern bard's 



82 TENNYSON [chap. hi. 

own lifetime, the task becomes far more difficult, and 
has foiled poets of very high reputation, as in the 
case of Walter Scott, who has given us a magnificent 
battle piece of Plodden, but two very inferior poems 
upon Waterloo. You cannot be romantic over a con- 
temporary battle or siege that has just been fully 
described in the newspapers, for the public knows 
exactly what happened; while if you attempt to be 
severely realistic you are lost among unmanageable 
details ; and you find yourself emphatically versifying 
what has already been said with the effective actuality 
of prose. 



CHAPTER IV 

maud; idylls of the king; enoch arden 

In August 1852 a son (the present Lord Tennyson) 
had been born in their house at Twickenham ; and in 
the next year they had at last found a permanent 
abiding place. For in 1853 Tennyson, having by this 
time an income of £500 a year from his poems, bought 
Farringford in the Isle of Wight, his favourite habita- 
tion ever afterwards, within sight of the sea, and 
within sound of its waves in a storm ; with the lawns, 
spreading trees, and meadows running up to the skirts 
of windy downs, that have been frequently sketched 
in his poetry, and will long be identified with his 
presence. There he worked, morning and evening, at 
" Maud," sitting in his high-backed wooden chair in a 
little room at the top of the house, and smoking the 
sacred pipes during certain half -hours of strict seclusion 
when his best thoughts came to him. 1 

In 1837 a collection of verses had been published 
under the title of The Tribute, signifying that they 
were contributed by various writers of repute at that 
time, in order that the profits of a subscription list to 
the volume might be offered to a man of letters who 
had fallen into poverty. Monckton Milnes wrote 
round for subscriptions to all his friends, among others 
to Alfred Tennyson, who sent a humorous refusal, 
1 Memoir. 
83 



84 TENNYSON [chap. 

averring that he had sworn never to assist in snch 
enterprises. Monckton Milnes did not appreciate the 
bantering tone of the letter, was angered by the 
refusal, and wrote a sour answer, whereupon Tennyson 
turned away his wrath with good-natured expostula- 
tion, and sent his contribution. It is a short poem 
of passionate lamentation for a woman who has been 
loved and is lost ; and it not only contains the theme 
upon which Maud was long afterwards worked out 
dramatically, but the stanzas reappear, with slight 
changes and considerable omissions, in the twenty- 
fourth section of the later poem; nor did Tennyson 
ever rise higher in the elegiac strain than in some of 
the best of them : — 

" that 'twere possible 
After long grief and pain 
To find the arms of my true love 
Round me once again ! 

******* 

" Alas for her that met me, 
That heard me softly call, 
Came glimmering thro' the laurels 
At the quiet evenfall, 
In the garden by the turrets 
Of the old manorial hall." * 

The fifth edition of In Memoriam had been published 
in 1852. It was followed in 1855 by the first appear- 
ance of Maud, which Lowell rather affectedly calls the 
antiphonal voice of the earlier poem. The change of 
subject, tone, and manner was certainly striking; and 

1 As The Tribute is now a very rare book, it is worth mentioning 
that this poem, in its original form, may be found at the end of vol. 
lxxix. of the Annual Register (1837). The sub-editor of the time 
was rebuked by his chief for having inserted among his selections 
from the year's poetry a bit of trivial verse. 



iv.] MAUD 85 

the public seem to have been taken by surprise. The 
transition was from irremediable sorrow to irresistible 
passion ; from philosophic meditation to a romantic 
love story with a tragic ending ; from stanzas swaying 
slowly like a dirge within their uniform compass, to 
an abundant variety of metrical movement, according 
with the_changes of scene and attuned to the develop- 
ment of the plot through ardent courtship to the 
lover's triumph, to detection, a duel, the frenzy of 
remorse, and the final chant of liberation from all 
these miserable memories, when "the old hysterical 
mock disease " is forgotten and overpowered in the 
tumultuous agitation of a great national war.* The gen- 
eral reader was unfavourably prepossessed by the tone 
of restless despondency that runs through the open- 
ing stanzas, and by the intimations of a morbid tem- 
perament, of a sickly cast of thought, which are given 
as the premonitory symptoms of a mind unfitted to 
withstand the shock of a sudden catastrophe. The 
light literary reviewer was disposed to be satirical 
upon a hero whose attitude was not heroical; the 
higher criticism was divided. The poet was, in fact, 
contending against a difficulty that is inseparable 
from the form of a metrical romance in which a single 
personage tells his own story ; for while a skilful 
novelist would easily have sketched such a character, 
or a playwright might have brought it out by action 
and dialogue, yet when a man is set up to confess his 
own intense sensibility, to describe his own misery 
and madness, the part becomes much harder to man- 
age, and the audience is apt to become impatient with 
him. Nevertheless Henry Taylor, Euskin, Jowett, 
and the Brownings spoke without hesitation of the 



86 TENNYSON [chap. 

poem's great merits. Tyndall bought the volume on 
his way to a theatre one evening ; he read it between 
the acts of the performance, continued it outside in 
the street, and had reached the end before he got 
home. He admired it extremely, and Lord Houghton, 
who agreed with him, exclaimed that the reviewers 
were blundering. 1 Jowett wrote : — 

" No poem since Shakespeare seems to show equal power 
of the same kind, or equal knowledge of human nature. 
No modern poem contains more lines that ring in the ears 
of men. I do not know any verse out of Shakespeare in 
which the ecstasy of love soars to such a height." 

This is certainly no faint praise; and although the 
general verdict would be that it is excessive, we have 
at any rate the first impression made by the poem's 
emotional force upon a very critical intellect. 

"The peculiarity of Maud," Tennyson said, "is that 
different phases of passion in one person take the 
place of different characters " ; and the effect of his 
own recitation was to set this conception in clear 
relief, by showing the connection and significance of 
the linked monodies, combined with the vivid musical 
rendering of a pathetic love story. The first spark 
of love kindles rapidly into heat, and the emotion 
rises by degrees of intensity to the rapture of meeting 
Maud in the garden, falling again suddenly to the 
depths of bitter despair ; until the luckless youth again 
recovers heart and strength in the stir and rumour of 
national war, and determines, as many have done before 
him, to stiffen his nerves by a course of energetic 
activity, and to try the bracing tonic of real danger. 

The poem in its development strikes all the lyrical 
1 Memoir. 



iv.] MAUD 87 

chords, although it cannot be said that all of them are 
touched with equal skill. Probably the sustained and 
perfect execution of such a varied composition would 
be too arduous a task for any artist, since it is no 
easy matter to substitute, dramatically, different 
phases of passion in one person for different char- 
acters. Some considerable mental agility is needed 
to fall in with the rapid changes of mood and motive 
which succeed each other within the compass of a 
piece that is too short for the delineation of character : 
ranging from melodramatic horror in the opening 
stanzas to passionate and joyous melodies in the 
middle part, sinking into a dolorous wail, rising into 
frenzy, and closing with the trumpet note of war. 

The Monodrama has in fact its peculiar difficulties 
of execution : the speaker has to introduce himself, 
and to explain the situation in a kind of indirect 
narrative that must be kept up to the lyrical pitch by 
effort and emphasis. The strain of this necessity is 
especially visible at the beginning of Maud, because 
the story opens with the familiar incident of financial 
disaster, and ordinary matters of fact have to be 
draped in the garb of poetry. The father of the solilo- 
quist has been ruined by the failure of a great specu- 
lation, which is understood to have enriched Maud's 
father ; and the son naturally denounces lying finan- 
ciers and mercantile greed in general, contrasting the 
ill-gotten luxury of a society which must cheat or be 
cheated with the hideous misery and crime of the 
poor. If these be the cankers of a calm world, the 
blessings of Peace; if pickpockets, burglars, and 
swindlers are to nourish, he infinitely prefers "the 
heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearth- 



88 TENNYSON [chap. 

stone/' the ardour of battle, the supreme struggle that 
turns every man into a patriot and a soldier. Clearly 
the poet is here compelled by the story's need of ele- 
vation, at this part of it, to paint in sombre or star- 
tling colours, to rhapsodise somewhat beyond reason, 
to overflow with scornful invective, and to allow a 
solitary youth to justify his disgust of life by railing 
at the degradation and rottenness of the world around 
him. It is Locksley Hall with the cry of revolt 
against modern society pitched an octave higher; 
and in the first and fourth sections there is so much 
in this vein that the melodramatic impression is not 
easily shaken off. Englishmen at large hesitate over 
thunderous denunciations, in verse, of social wrongs ; 
and the sorrows or disappointments of the money 
market are good matter for the prose writer, but 
hardly for the poet, who cannot be expected to give 
the economist or the politician fair play. Questions of 
this kind belong to the frigid utilitarian order, and it 
is dangerous to handle them enthusiastically. 

But the vision of Maud, his playmate in childhood, 
scatters all these distempered complainings ; and the 
young man becomes absorbed in the love of a beauti- 
ful girl. The wooing and the winning of her, the 
rapid growth of a mutual passion, the stolen meetings, 
the plighting of troth, the ecstasy of his adoration, 
the waiting for her in the garden after a ball, are told 
in a series of exquisite lyrics, of which it may be said 
that the English language contains none better than 
the very best of them. The subtle influences of sight 
and sound, of dawn and twilight, 

" the voice of the long sea wave as it swelled 
Now and then in the dim gray dawn," 



iv.] MAUD 89 

the call of the birds in the high Hall garden, the 
spreading cedar, the glance of an evening sun over 
the dark moorland, the chilly white mist falling like 
a shroud, mingle with and heighten the romance of 
their secret love passages, and bring shadowy pre- 
sentiments of danger. The stars shine brighter as he 
looks at them and thinks of his sleeping lady : — 

" But now by this my love has closed her sight 
And given false death her hand, and stol'n away 
To dreamful wastes where footless fancies dwell 
Among the fragments of the golden day. 

******* 
And ye meanwhile far over moor and fell 

Beat to the noiseless music of the night ! 
Has our whole earth gone nearer to the glow 
Of your soft splendours that you look so bright ? 
Beat, happy stars, timing with things below, 
Beat with my heart more blest than heart can tell, 
Blest, but forborne dark undercurrent woe." 

Yet the poet is still hampered by the necessity of 
explaining his plot, and of describing the dramatis 
personal through the mouth of a single actor ; and so 
the sensitive lover has to tell of his meeting with the 
young lord, his rival, who, 

" Leisurely tapping a glossy boot, 

And curving a contumelious lip, 

Gorgonised me from head to foot 

With a stony British stare.' 1 
This sharp figure-drawing, almost caricature, would be 
excellent in a novel or upon the stage ; but when it is 
interposed among tender idyllic melodies there is a jar 
upon the delicate ear ; there is a lapse into undignified 
expression which is incompatible with the refined 
exaltation of tone that is essential to a romantic 
passion-play. In his beautiful song of rapturous 



90 TENNYSON [chap. 

expectation, " Come into the garden, Maud," the poet 
rises to the highest point of his verse just when the 
drama reaches its climax ; for the end of the romance 
has come, and the whole pageantry of love-making 
vanishes like a dream. The lovers are detected, there 
is a furious quarrel, a fatal duel ; and the unfortunate 
hero is next found, mad with despair and remorse, on 
the coast of Brittany. 

The first title proposed for the poem was " Maud 
and the Madness"; and a leading specialist for in- 
sanity wrote that it was the most faithful representa- 
tion of madness since Shakespeare. 1 Such a certificate 
is but of moderate value in poetry, where success 
depends on artistic treatment of the subject ; and in 
Shakespeare the disease is never more than an acces- 
sory to the delineation of his principal characters. 
Hamlet was mad only when he chose to be so ; nor is 
it possible to agree with Tennyson when he said, in 
alluding to some captious reviews, that " without the 
prestige of Shakespeare Hamlet (if it came out now) 
would be treated in just the same way" by incom- 
petent critics. The two characters, Hamlet and Maud's 
lover, will not bear a moment's comparison from any 
point of view. But delirium is far less manageable in 
a poem than in a play, where violent scenes and 
speeches are admissible ; and if we allow for this inev- 
itable difficulty of execution, it may be agreed that the 
wandering incoherent mind of Maud's lover in his 
madness is effectively rendered. The final strophes 
of the poem have some strenuous and animated lines, 
representing a puissant nation rising boldly to the 
alarm of war, which is to purge the people of sloth 
1 Memoir. 



iv.] ' MAUD 91 

and mean cupidity, and to unite them in one patriotic 
impulse. Some such, notions of fighting as a whole- 
some restorative had been eD gendered, in 1855, among 
home-keeping Englishmen by forty years of peace ; 
but since that time they have learnt by experience 
what war really signifies ; and the belief that it is 
a good medicine for the cankers of plethoric prosperity 
must now have fallen considerably out of fashion. Mr. 
Gladstone, in the Quarterly Review of 1855, protested 
against the doctrine that war is a cure for moral evil, 
or that it is a specific for the particular evil of 
Mammon worship. He maintained, on the contrary, 
that modern war is a remarkable incentive to that 
worship ; though Tennyson might have replied that in 
Milton's great council of war Mammon's speech is 
ignobly pacific. There is at any rate a curious adum- 
bration of recent incidents in one sentence of this 
article, where it is said that " war in its moral opera- 
tion resembles, perhaps, more than anything else the 
finding of a gold-field." Mr. Gladstone, however, con- 
siderably qualified his first adverse judgment in a note 
(dated 1878) that he appended to this article when it 
was republished in his Gleanings of Past Years — 

" Whether it is to be desired that a poem should require 
from common men a good deal of effort in order to compre- 
hend it ; whether all that is put into the mouth of the 
Soliloquist in ' Maud ' is within the lines of poetical verisi- 
militude ; whether this poem has the full moral equilibrium 
which is so marked a characteristic of the sister- works ; are 
questions open, perhaps, to discussion. But I have neither 
done justice in the text to its rich and copious beauties of 
detail, nor to its great lyrical and metrical power. And what 
is worse, I have failed to comprehend rightly the relation 
between particular passages in the poem and its general 



92 TENNYSON [chap. 

scope. This is, I conceive, not to set forth any coherent 
strain, but to use for poetical ends all the moods and phases 
allowable under the laws of the art, in a special form of 
character, which is impassioned, fluctuating, and ill-grounded. 
The design, which seems to resemble that of the Ecclesiastes 
in another sphere, is arduous ; but Mr. Tennyson's power of 
execution is probably nowhere greater." 

The allusion to Ecclesiastes is enigmatic, for the 
Preacher deals with neither love nor war, and his 
theme is that all luxury, pleasure, and the delight of 
the senses, are but vexation and vanity. If any re- 
semblance with Tennyson's poetry is to be found in 
Ecclesiastes, it should be with the Palace of Art. 1 

In the same article it is observed, truly, that Tenny- 
son's war poetry is not equal to his poetry of peace. 
One may add that neither irony, nor fierce invective, 
suits Tennyson's genius very Avell ; they carry him 
too near to the perilous domain of rhetoric. It is to 
the lays of love and heartrending lamentation in 
Maud, with their combined intensity and refinement, 
that unqualified praise may be accorded, to their 
romantic grace and their soft cadences, in which the 
melody seems inseparable from the meaning. 

For Onomatopoeia, which began by direct imitation 

1 Ecclesiastes ii. 4, 5, 6, 8, 11 — 

" I made me great works; I builded me houses; I planted me 
vineyards : 

******* 

" I gathered me also silver and gold, and the peculiar treasure of 
kings and of the provinces: I gat me men singers and women 
singers, and the delights of the sons of men, as musical instru- 
ments, and that of all sorts. 

******* 

" Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, 
and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was 
vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the 
sun." 



iv.] MAUD 93 

of natural sounds, has been developed by the highest 
art of poetry into prolonged associations of sound and 
sense. A single line may set the ear listening ; it 
stirs the memory by recalling what has been once 
heard, or by making the words echo their significance, 
as for example in 

"By the long wash of Australasian seas." 
And the subtle sensibility that adapts the word to the 
thing adapts the sentence or cadence to the general 
meaning or spirit of a whole passage, 1 reviving the 
impression of a summer dawn in a garden, the scent 
of flowers, " the voice of the long sea wave." Recita- 
tion is a better test of these qualities than reading, for 
all poetry may be said to make its primary appeal to 
the ear ; and even the length of the lines must have 
formed itself to a great degree on the natural con- 
ditions of respiration and oral delivery. It is versifica- 
tion regularly accentuated, with the terminal rhyme 
marking each line's end harmoniously, that now chiefly 
delights the English ear, fixing the measure by a recur- 
rent chime, a beautiful invention that is nevertheless a 
comparatively recent importation into European verse. 
In our earliest poetry the place of the accents was 
indicated by alliteration ; while since there was no 
terminal bar, the line's length might be varied at the 
composer's discretion. Some of the cantos in Maud 
seem to have been so far constructed on a similar 
principle, that the lines vary considerably in length, 
and the rhyme is sounded with remarkable skill 
at irregular intervals, marking fluctuations of emo- 
tion. We have here, in fact, something resembling 

1 See a dissertation on Onomatopoeia in Jowett's Plato, vol. i. 
p. 310. 



94 TENNYSON [chap. 

what is called in France the Vers Libre, manipu- 
lated by a master of harmonies — a metrical arrange- 
ment of which, though it is no innovation in our 
poetry, Tennyson has made superior use. For al- 
though Southey discarded regularity of length in 
the verse of Thalaba and Kehama, the prevailing form 
in those poems is the ten-syllable blank verse metre, 
varied by shorter iambic lines, with a correctness of 
scansion that becomes monotonous. In Maud the 
poet by no means despises alliteration ; he is rather 
apt to overstrain it occasionally as a method of en- 
forcing the sense of a line by its sound, and of 
weighing its accentuation. 

"The shrill-edged shriek of a mother divides the shuddering 
night" 
******* 
4 ' And out he walked when the wind like a broken worlding 
wailed," 
******* 
But the value of his experiment comes from his 

dexterity in expanding the undulating flexibility of 
the old English free verse, with the rhymes interposed 
as an accompaniment to the metre, and falling on the 
expectant ear like the chime of bells. Nor do we ever 
detect in Tennyson, as we do too often in Browning, 
the insincere or superfluous phrase that is brought 
in for the rhyme's sake, and is accommodated with 
more or less dexterity to the poet's real intention. 
Throughout his poetry we have constantly reason to 
admire his resource and capacity for shaping metrical 
forms to suit the impression that he desires to convey ; 
while in such pieces as The Talking Oak we may 
appreciate the light and delicate touch of his hand 
upon the standard customary metres of our language. 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 95 

Having -by this time taken up his settled quarters 
at Farringford, Tennyson was now seriously occupied 
with his work upon the Arthurian legends, which 
had already furnished him with material for some of 
the best among his minor poems. Two Idylls were 
in print by 1857, and in 1859 the first four were pub- 
lished. The poet then took ship for Lisbon, whence 
he contemplated a journey into southern Spain; but 
he was an impatient traveller, who loved above all 
things his own land, not largely endued with the much- 
enduring temper of his Ulysses ; so the autumnal heat 
and the mosquitoes drove him back to England within 
a month. Meanwhile, the Idylls were rapidly and 
widely taken up by the English public, with many 
congratulations from personal friends. Thackeray 
sends, after reading them, a letter full of his charac- 
teristic humour and good-fellowship — 

"The landlord — at Folkestone — gave two bottles of his 
claret, and I think I drank the most ; and here I have been 
lying back in the chair and thinking of those delightful Idylls, 
my thoughts being turned to you ; and what could I do but 
be grateful to that surprising genius which has made me so 
happy." 

Jowett wrote enthusiastically of the "Maid of 
Astolat" — 

" There are hundreds and hundreds of all ages, men as well 
as women, who, although they have not died for love (have no 
intention of doing so), will find there a sort of ideal consolation 
of their own troubles and remembrances." 

The Duke of Argyll's praise is slightly, though 
unintentionally, ambiguous. "Your Idylls of the 
King," he tells the author, " will be understood and 
admired by many who are incapable of understanding 



96 TENNYSON [chap. 

and appreciating many others of your works." He 
goes on — 

" Macaulay is certainly not a man incapable of under- 
standing anything, but I knew that his tastes in poetry 
were so formed in another line that I considered him a good 
test, and three days ago I gave him ' Guinevere ' — " 

with the result that Macaulay was " delighted with it." 
Upon this Tennyson responds to His Grace somewhat 
caustically — 

" My Dear Duke, — Doubtless Macaulay's good opinion 
is worth having, and I am grateful to you for letting me 
know it, but this time I intend to be thick-skinned ; nay, I 
scarcely believe that I should ever feel very deeply the pen- 
punctures of those parasitic animalcules of the press, if they 
kept themselves to what I write, and did not glance spite- 
fully and personally at myself. I hate spite." 1 

Folklore has rarely undergone such changes of 
style and transformations of environment in its 
passage through different countries and successive 
generations, as the Arthurian legend has exhibited 
from its origin among the Celts of insular Britain 
to its latest revival in modern English poetry. The 
lays and tales of Arthur and his knights, the relics 
of a large number that have been lost, were saved 
from oblivion in England by the Anglo-Normans, 
whose poetic instinct led them to enjoy in their 
courts and castles the songs of wandering minstrels 
and popular stories of marvellous adventure. Thus 
the primitive element took a Romanesque fashion, 
and was expanded in the spirit of mediaeval chivalry ; 
the legends were translated into French and English, 
1 AH these quotations are taken from the Memoir. 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 97 

until at last they were gathered together and fixed 
permanently in an English form when Caxton printed 
Sir Thomas Malory's collection. A whole cycle sur- 
rounds the central figure of King Arthur, whom one 
may conjecture to have embodied the true tradition of 
some valiant chief who fought hard for his lands and 
his people against the Saxon invaders ; for in a pre- 
historic age it is the real hero, famous when he lived, 
who becomes fabulous after his death. And so Arthur 
emerged out of a period of darkest confusion, trail- 
ing after him Christian myths and heroic legends ; 
he passed through wandering minstrelsy to prose 
romance, and then again into poetry when he became 
the portrait, in Spenser's Fairy Queen, of a brave 
knight perfected in the twelve moral virtues, the 
leading actor in an allegory that is supposed to teach 
morals and politics under a transparent masque of 
adventurous knight-errantry. 

" The generall end, therefore, of all the book is to fashion a 
gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline, 
which for that I conceived shoulde be more plausible and 
pleasing, being coloured iuto an historical fiction, the which 
the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of 
matter than for profite of the ensample, I chose the historye of 
King Arthur, as most fit for the excellency of his person, being 
made famous by many men's former works, and also furthest 
from the daunger of envy and suspicion of the present time." 1 

During the classical and rationalistic period of 
eighteenth-century poetry King Arthur's romantic 
figure suffered eclipse, until in the early nineteenth 
century Malory's book was republished. And lastly 
he shone out again fifty years later in the Idylls, 
1 Spenser's " Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh " (1589). 



98 TENNYSON [chap. 

modelled by Tennyson after the type used by Spenser, 
as the image of lofty morality, the modern gentleman, 
the magnanimous husband of an unworthy queen. As 
Spenser dedicated his poem to "Elizabeth, by the 
Grace of God, Queen of England, France, and Ireland 
and Virginia," so Tennyson offered the Idylls as his 
tribute to the Sovereign of far wider dominions : — 
11 But thou, my Queen, 
Not for itself, but thro' thy living love 
For one to whom I made it o'er his grave 
Sacred, accept this old imperfect tale, 
New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul, 
Ideal manhood closed in real man, 
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost, 
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, 
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still ; or him 
Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one 
Touch'd by the adulterous finger of a time 
That hover'd between war and wantonness." 

Thus Arthur is still a poet's ideal and illustration of 
unstained virtue and manliness, with the difference 
that his environment of fairyland, enchantments, 
and adventurous gallantry, has become much more 
strange to modern readers than it was in the sixteenth 
century, when Spenser used the conventional romantic 
style and apparatus that were current in his day. 
Arthur does not even represent, in dim outline, the 
lineaments of some famous historical personage, like 
Charlemagne or even Eoland ; he is an unsubstantial 
and almost wholly fabulous model of chivalric perfec- 
tion; the Bound Table, the Knights errant, Merlin, 
the Holy Grail, are employed as the framework of a 
picture restored and repainted ; the costumes and 
scenery of the drama are antique, with a revised 



iv.] — IDYLLS OF THE KING 99 

version of the characters. A modern romance of 
chivalry is necessarily a restoration, with the details 
of character, circumstance, and manners reproduced, 
as in Scott's romances, more or less accurately from 
the surviving records of the time. In the case of the 
Arthurian idylls this accessory work could not be done, 
because authentic materials are entirely wanting ; the 
scenes, personages, and situations are either mythical, 
or at most reflect later mediaeval ideas and types. To 
a certain extent this has been a drawback upon the 
popularity of a brilliant poetic enterprise ; for it was 
inevitable that upon the critical, naturalistic, exact- 
ing temper of the nineteenth century in its third 
quarter the Idylls should have produced some feeling 
of incongruousness, of perfection in art with a lack of 
actuality — an impression of the kind that is delicately 
conveyed in a letter from Ruskin to Tennyson soon 
after the publication of the new poems. The four 
songs seemed to him the jewels of the crown, and 
certain passages he reckoned to be " finer than almost 
all you have done yet. Nevertheless " (he went on), 

" I am not sure but I feel the art and finish in these poems 
a little more than I like to feel it. Yet I am not a fair judge 
quite, for I am so much of a realist as not by any possibility 
to interest myself much in an unreal subject, to feel it as I 
should, and the very sweetness and stateliness of the words 
strike me all the more as pure workmanship. . . . Treasures 
of wisdom there are in it, and word-painting such as never 
was yet for concentration, nevertheless it seems to me that so 
great power ought not to be spent on visions of things past, 
but on the living present. For one hearer capable of feeling 
the depth of this poem, I believe ten would feel a depth quite 
as great if the stream flowed through things nearer the hearer. 
... I cannot but think that the intense, masterfid, and un- 
erring transcript of an actuality, and the relation of a story of 

rLoFC. 



100 TENNYSON [chap. 

any real human life as a poet would watch and analyse it, 
would make all men feel more or less what poetry was, as they 
felt what Life and Fate were in their instant workings." 1 

Ruskin here touches and indicates a line of criticism 
upon the general conception of the Idylls, as shown by 
their treatment of the Arthurian legends, with which, 
although some may pronounce it inadequate, many 
may be disposed to agree. Eomance-writing has been 
defined, half seriously, as the art of producing the 
literary work that can give the greatest imaginative 
pleasure to a people in the actual state of their habits 
and beliefs. The Idylls adapted the mythical tales 
of the Round Table to the very highest standard of 
aesthetic taste, intellectual refinement, and moral deli- 
cacy then prevailing in cultivated English society ; and 
by that society they were very cordially appreciated. 
Undoubtedly the figure of Arthur — representing a 
warrior-king endowed with the qualities of unselfish- 
ness, clemency, generosity, and noble trustfulness, yet 
betrayed by his wife and his familiar friend, forgiving 
her, and going forth to die in a lost fight against 
treacherous rebels — has a grandeur and a pathos that 
might well affect a gravely emotional people. More- 
over, the poem is a splendidly illuminated Morality, 
unfolding scenes and incidents that illustrate heroic 
virtues and human frailties, gallantry, sore tempta- 
tions, domestic perfidy, chaste virginal love, and subtle 
amorous enchantments. It abounds also in descriptive 
passages which attest the close attention of the poet's 
ear and eye to natural sights and sounds, and his rare 
faculty of fashioning his verse to their colours and 
echoes. In short, to quote from the Memoir : — 
1 Memoir, 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 101 

" He has made these old legends his own, restored the 
idealism, infused into them a spirit of modern thought and 
of ethical significance ; setting his characters in a rich and 
varied landscape." 

This indeed lie has clone well. And yet these archaic 
stories, as they are told in Malory's fifteenth-century 
English, which preserves the romantic flavour, have 
never lost their hold on the English world at large. In 
their latest form they have to contend with the modern 
prejudice against unreality, against the sense that we 
have here a vision not merely of things that are past, 
but of things that could never have been, of a world 
that is neither ancient nor modern, but a fairyland 
peopled with knights and dames whose habits and 
conversation are adjusted to the decorous manners of 
our nineteenth century. In Malory's time the legends 
were apparently regarded by the ordinary reader as 
belonging to what we should call the Romance of 
History, for Caxton relates that he was much pressed 
" to emprynte the noble history of the Saynt Graal and 
that most renowned crysten king, Arthur," but that 
he long hesitated because of the opinion that all such 
books as had been made of Arthur had been "but 
fayned and fabled." Yet when Malory's book was 
reprinted in 1634, the editor indignantly reproved, in 
his preface, the incredulity and stupidity of those 
who deny or make doubt of Arthur's immortal name 
and fame ; and as to the manner of writing, he affirmed 
that he has only corrected it where " King Arthur 
and some of his knights were declared to swear 
prophane and use superstitious speeches." The tradi- 
tion was still regarded as not wholly fictitious, with 
the charm of antique diction hanging about it to 



102 TENNYSON [chap. 

encourage the illusion; and marvels and miracles, 
gods and giants, were commonly accepted with a kind 
of half belief by readers who took little account of 
the Improbable or the Unnatural. But this conven- 
tional understanding has long disappeared; the con- 
ceptions are now universally admitted to be " f ayned 
and fabled " ; and it has become much more difficult to 
use the old legends as mere vehicles for new man- 
ners and ideas than it was to translate the Celtic 
folklore into the language of mediaeval romance. 
Spenser's Fairy Queen was frankly allegorical ; and 
if we regard the Idylls also as beautiful allegories, 
we may be content, as their author was, with his 
suggestion that King Arthur represents conscience, 
and that the poem is a picture of the different ways 
in which men looked on conscience, some reverencing 
it as a heaven-born king, others ascribing to it an 
earthly origin — a philosophical argument set forth in 
a parable. We may then be satisfied with learning, 
from the poet himself, that " Camelot, for instance, 
a city of shadowy palaces, is everywhere symbolical of 
the gradual growth of human beliefs and institutions, 
and of the spiritual development of man." Symbolism 
is an instrument by which the severe and peremptory 
dictates of formal philosophy or religion are softened 
down and shaped for poetic expression ; and in the 
light of this interpretation the Idylls are seen to be 
a finely woven tissue of figurative mysticism, clothing 
the antique forms with fresh esoteric meaning. 

"The Holy Grail," said Tennyson, "is one of the 
most imaginative of my poems. I have expressed there 
my strong feeling as to the reality of the Unseen " ; 
and truly in no other Idyll does the spiritual signifi- 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 103 

cance stand out so clearly : it is the most successful 
of his excursions into this field of allegorical romance. 
From the same point of view we may admire and 
interpret, to a certain extent, the whole collection, 
though it must be remarked that stories with a moral 
lesson, however beautifully told, are not precisely 
allegories. Moreover, Tennyson has also said that 
"there is no single fact or incident in the Idylls, 
however seemingly mystical, which cannot be ex- 
plained without any mystery or allegory whatever," 
and he constantly protested against pressing too far 
the search for an inner meaning ; he would not admit 
an obligation to find it everywhere. He would have 
probably accepted the theory that his poem should 
be treated as a renewed presentation of the tragic 
experience of life, where men and women pay the 
inevitable penalty of sin and vice ; and where never- 
theless the highest nobility of character will not 
always ward off unmerited disaster and final catas- 
trophe. The legend of a king's ruin through his 
wife's infidelity is an ancient tale of wrong, that has 
stamped itself on the popular imagination by its dra- 
matic force and the contrast of characters. Arthur 
the King, Lancelot the chief warrior of his host, 
Guinevere the peerless beauty who brings discord 
between them, Modred the traitor knight, represent 
personages that belong to epic and romance in various 
distant ages and countries ; the traitor meets his 
punishment, but the hero perishes unhappily. Such 
was the lesson of the primitive story-teller, from 
Homer downward, who drew life from natural experi- 
ence, not as it is seen through the romantic colouring 
of a softer moralising age. And the same lesson is to 



104 TENNYSON [chap. 

be read in the Idylls, although, the action of the drama, 
the conduct and character of the leading personages, 
are applied and brought home to the modern reader 
by so far readjusting them as to bring them nearer 
to the feelings and proprieties of the present day. 
They are made more probable in order that they 
may be more impressive ; the poet has preserved the 
ideals, clothing them in new conventional garments. 

That Tennyson could excel in the art of veiling 
an experience of all ages under an allegory we know 
from his short poem, The Lady of Shalott, where 
the mirror of the shadows of the passing world, and 
the magic web that the lady weaves wearily, are 
brought in to give an atmosphere of mystery to the 
story of the Maid of Astolat's hopeless passion for 
Lancelot. But in the Idyll of Lancelot and Elaine the 
treatment is no longer mysterious but naturalistic ; 
we have the maiden's timid adoration of the magnifi- 
cent knight, the grief and trouble of her father and 
brothers, and the Queen's angry jealousy at hearing 
that Lancelot is wearing the maiden's token. The 
shy sweetness of Elaine, who is dying of unrequited 
love, is contrasted with the figure of the superb 
imperious Guinevere, who scorns her husband, " a 
moral child without the craft to rule," and sharply 
suspects her paramour. Lancelot offers her the 
diamonds which he has won with a sore wound at a 
tournament, and she flings them out of her window 
into the river, just as the barge with the dead Maid of 
Astolat comes floating down before the palace. This 
incident has a distant resemblance to some drama- 
of modern society, and, indeed, the moral of this Idyll 
is so plain as to need no allegorical interpretation ; it 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 105 

is a true parable and warning for men and women 
always and everywhere. The Idyll interweaves some 
magnificent embroidery upon the unvarnished canvas 
of the old romance ; it contains the plaintive song — 

' ' Sweet is true love tho' given in vain, in vain ; 
And sweet is death who puts an end to pain " — 

the sighing of innocent love sinking to quiet despair — 
with many passages of tender grace and animating 
imagery — 

" They couch' d their spears and prick' d their steeds, and thus, 
Their plumes driv'n backward by the wind they made 
In moving, all together down upon him 
Bare, as a wild wave in the wide North-sea 
Green-glimmering toward the summit, bears, with all 
Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies, 
Down on a bark, and overbears the bark, 
And him that helms it, so they overbore 
Sir Lancelot and his charger." 

At the central situation and catastrophe of the 
Arthurian epic we have a still more remarkable 
reconstruction of plot and character. In the old 
chronicle, when Lancelot and Guinevere are at last 
entrapped and beset, the knight fights his way out, 
and the Queen is condemned by her husband to be 
burnt alive, but is rescued by Lancelot after much 
bloodshed; and the great war begins in which the 
whole Table Bound is dissolved. Lancelot surrenders 
the Queen to King Arthur, who takes her back as 
Menelaus took Helen back to Lacedeemon ; there is the 
same sentiment of a woman's comparative irresponsi- 
bility when fierce warriors are contending for her ; and 
Guinevere does not become a nun until Arthur has 



106 TENNYSON [chap. 

been slain in the last battle. The sympathy of the 
chronicle is entirely with Guinevere — 

" Therefore, all ye that be lovers, call into your remem- 
brance the moneth of May, as did Queen Guinevere, for 
whom I make here a little mention, that while she loved she 
was a true lover, and therefore she had a good end." 

She is here the persistent type of the fatal woman 
who brings about a hero's death, the legendary cause of 
wars, assassinations, and the loss of kingdoms, as she 
is still the cause of bloodsheds and revengeful murders 
among warlike tribes ; her misconduct is now in civil- 
ised society no more than a private misfortune, it was 
formerly a public calamity. And yet the old Celtic 
romance treats Guinevere with indulgence and pity, 
for it is a tale of unhappy love. In Tennyson's Idyll 
the tone and management of the situation have been 
carefully adjusted to the ethical sentiment of the pres- 
ent time. The King, when he visits the Queen in the 
nunnery to which she has fled, promises that she shall 
be protected ; he leaves men 

" To guard thee in the wild hour coming on, 
Lest but a hair of this low head be harm'd." 

But he will never see her again — 

" I hold that man the worst of public foes 
Who either for his own or children's sake, 
To save his blood from scandal, lets the wife 
Whom he knows false, abide and rule the house. 

¥& "?F 3p 7F" ¥fc 3f vfc 

Better the King's waste hearth and aching heart 
Than thou reseated in thy place of light, 
The mockery of my people, and their bane." 

The unfortunate Queen, left alone, pours out her re- 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 107 

morse at having preferred an ardent lover, the flower 
of chivalry, to her blameless King, whom she had once 
found too immaculate — 

" A moral child without the craft to rule, 
Else had he not lost me. 

******* 
I thought I could not breathe in that fine air, 
That pure severity of perfect light. 
I yearned for warmth and colour, which I found 
In Lancelot." 

Thus in Tennyson's poem we have the faithless wife 
and injured husband of our own society; a woman's 
agonised repentance and a man's stern justice that is 
neither hard nor unforgiviDg ; we have the costumes, 
the scenery, and the dramatis personal of the old 
romance with a change of feeling and manners. The 
result is, in the first place, that the excellent Arthur 
lacks tragic quality ; he does not interest us sufficiently ; 
while there is even something tame, from the dramatic 
point of view, in his high-minded generosity toward 
Guinevere. Secondly, to a mind prepossessed with 
the exactitude of modern taste, the scene between the 
King and Queen at Amesbury, notwithstanding its 
elevation of tone and austere purity of feeling, sug- 
gests something like a splendid anachronism, though 
as a moral lesson, nobly delivered, it has indisputable 
power and beauty. The poet is undoubtedly entitled 
to illustrate universal truths by striking off a new and 
powerful impression from the unchanging types of 
human character ; yet those who have no great skill at 
deciphering the Hyponoia, the underlying significance 
of the Idylls, may be pardoned for confessing to a 
feeling of something remote, shadowy, and spectacular 



108 TENNYSON [chap. 

in tlie company of these mediaeval knights and dames, 
wizards and wantons, who pass over the stage and per- 
form their parts before an audience whose deeper 
thoughts have long ceased to run in the vein of fantas- 
tic allegory. The unreality of the whole environment 
inevitably diminishes the dramatic effect. 

The story of Tristram and La Belle Iseult, 1 which is 
perhaps the most beautifully pathetic in the whole 
cycle of Eomance, stirring all hearts with sympathy 
for irresistible ill-fated passion, is left half told in 
Malory's Morte d' Arthur, though Lancelot alludes to 
Tristram's treacherous murder by King Mark. Nor 
has Tennyson, in his Idyll of the Last Tournament, 
availed himself of the supremely poetical ending of 
the old legend, when Tristram, mortally wounded, 
sends a messenger across the sea to bring Iseult of 
Cornwall, his first love, to Brittany. The returning 
vessel, when it comes within sight from the Breton 
shore, is to hoist a white sail if it is bringing Iseult, a 
black sail if she has refused to come. But Iseult of 
Brittany, his wife, tells him falsely that the vessel has 
been sighted with a black sail, whereupon Tristram, 
who had kept himself alive [" retenait sa vie "] until 
then, lets himself expire ; and Iseult of Cornwall 
lands only to die of grief over his body. Here the 
dominant feeling is of pity and pardon for broken- 
hearted lovers, but in the Idyll of the Last Tourna- 
ment Tristram's story has the conclusion of another 
and probably a later version, which is sudden and vio- 
lent. King Mark, Arthur's antitype, is the suspicious 
and vindictive husband, who surprises Tristram with 
his wife, and kills him in the arms of Iseult ; there is 
1 Ot "Isoude." 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 109 

here no allegory or romantic circumstance, but the 
sombre morality of a doom like that of Francesca da 
Rimini, of lovers whose fate melted even the austerity 
of Dante. One might wish that Tennyson had pre- 
ferred the softer and more compassionate ending ; the 
more so because the story of Tristram, lying with fail- 
ing breath in his castle that overlooked the sea, and 
receiving his death stroke from the word brought him 
of the black sail, would have given ample scope for 
finely wrought descriptive poetry, and for touching the 
highest chords of emotion. Yet the Idyll tells its 
own story forcibly, without effort or exaggeration of 
language ; the shadow of danger grows darker over 
the amorous discourse of Tristram and Iseult in her 
bower, where the reckless passion of the woman and 
the kindling desire of the man blind them to the 
impending calamity, until their lips meet — 

" But, while he bow'd to kiss the jewelPd throat, 
Out of the dark, just as the lips had touch'd, 
Behind him rose a shadow and a shriek — 
' Mark's way,' said Mark, and clove him through the brain." 

The poem has several examples of Tennyson's singular 
skill in briefly sketching broad landscapes — 

' ' But Arthur with a hundred spears 
Rode far, till o'er the illimitable reed, 
And many a glancing plash and sallowy isle, 
The wide-wing' d sunset of the misty marsh 
Glared on a huge machicolated tower." 
Again — 

" As the crest of some slow-arching wave, 
Heard in dead night along that table-shore, 
Drops flat, and after the great waters break 
Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves, 
Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud." 



110 TENNYSON [chap. 

Or a single line may be the setting of a picture, as in 

" The long low dune and lazy plunging sea." 

And in the Passing of Arthur, when the King is 
following Modred to the down by the seaside, where 
he is to fight the last " dim weird battle of the west," 
the poet again shows his power of fixing by a few 
strokes the impression of a desolate wilderness bounded 
by the sky-lines of mountain and sea. 

' ' Then rose the King and moved his host by night, 
And ever push'd Sir Modred, league by league, 
Back to the sunset bound of Lyonnesse — 
A land of old upheaven from the abyss 
By fire, to sink into the abyss again ; 
Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt, 
And the long mountains ended in a coast 
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away 
The phantom circle of a moaning sea." 

In this Idyll, the last of the series, we have Tennyson's 
Morte d' Arthur fragment of 1842, reproduced with 
additions at the beginning and the end to carry on and 
wind up the epical narrative, and to point the moral 
intention. The fantastic folklore no longer discon- 
certs us, the final Act of the drama is purely heroic. 
We have a clear view of a noble ruler of his people, 
born out of his due time, who after striving to realise 
a lofty ideal of justice and humanity in a wild age, 
finds the whole fabric of his State ruined by domestic 
perfidy and armed rebellion, and marches full of doubt 
and despondency to the battle in which he is to fall 
and to disappear mysteriously. 

"For I, being simple, thought to work His will, 
And have but stricken with the sword in vain ; 



iv.] IDYLLS OF THE KING 111 

And all whereon I lean'd in wife and friend 
Is traitor to my peace, and all my realm 
Reels back into the beast, and is no more. 
My God, Thou hast forgotten me in my death : 
Nay — God my Christ — I pass but shall not die." 

The two armies meet, shrouded in a white mist by the 
seashore, in a stubborn fight, until 

' ' When the dolorous day 
Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came 
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew 
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide 
Eose, and the pale King glanced across the field 
Of battle : but no man was moving there." 

He sees Modred, kills him with one last stroke, and 
falls all but slain. Then follows the well-known 
episode of the casting of his sword Excalibur into the 
mere, and the appearance of the dusky barge with the 
black-hooded Queens. 

In no other part of the entire poem is the magic of 
the old romance so finely interfused with allegory as 
at the close of this Idyll, where patriotic courage and 
virtue are seen contending vainly against the powers 
of evil, against that adverse Pate, otherwise inexorable 
Circumstance, which is too strong for human endeavour, 
and shapes man's visible destiny. Just as neither 
valour, nor unflinching devotion to his city, nor nobility 
of character, could save Hector from death, or An- 
dromache from bitter servitude, so against Arthur the 
hard facts of life must prevail, and he perishes with all 
his knights save one. His enchanted sword, the 
emblem of personal prowess, is thrown back to the 
water fairy as a sign that his warfare is ended ; and 



112 TENNYSON [chap. 

the three Queens with whom he sails away to the 
island-valley of Avilion may be, to those who seek for 
an inner meaning, symbolical of the angels who bear 
away to heaven the soul of a brave warrior. One may 
well believe that the Morte cl' Arthur legend is, like the 
Chanson de Koland, the far-descended survival of a 
genuine tradition of some ancient battle, in which a 
renowned chief was defeated and slain with the flower 
of his fighting men. Eoland, like Arthur, survives to 
the last ; his dying effort is to break his sword Duran- 
dal, as Arthur's is to have Excalibur flung into the 
lake. But Duranclal will not break, for there are holy 
relics in the hollow of the hilt ; Roland confesses his 
sins, commends himself to God, and St. Michael and 
St. Gabriel take charge of his soul. We are here 
in the full atmosphere of Christian piety and the 
mediaeval Church, uncoloured by that free myth-mak- 
ing imagination, the primitive semi-pagan element, 
which Tennyson has retained to give its charm and 
glamour to his verse. His poem closes, epically, with 
the vanishing of Arthur ; though the prose chronicle 
goes on to relate how Lancelot bade farewell to Guine- 
vere in her cloister, followed her funeral to Glaston- 
bury, died there of grief at her tomb, and was buried 
in his castle of Joyous Garde, where Sir Ector finds 
men singing the dirge over him "full lamentably." 
There was good matter here for another Idyll, but the 
sequel might have disturbed the unity of Tennyson's 
plan ; and moreover the doleful complaint of Sir Ector 
over Lancelot's body, with its piercing simplicity of 
words and feeling, rises so nearly to the highest level 
of heroic poetry — of such passages as Helen's lament 
over Hector's corpse in the Iliad — that even Tenny- 



iv.] ENOCH ARDEN 113 

son's art could hardly have paraphrased it success- 
fully. 

If, after reading through the Idylls, we take up 
Enoch Arden, which followed them in 1864, the con- 
trast of style and subject is again remarkable. This 
poem begins by the sketch of a little seaport on the 
East Anglian coast, with the nets, old boats, and ship 
timber strewed about the shore, and it winds on 
through the tale of a fisherman's homely joys and 
griefs, reminding us of Crabbe, without the quality 
of hard pathos which Tennyson found in him ; for the 
tone is softer and there are more gleams of colour. 
Moreover, although the poet has done his best to 
lower the pitch of his instrument into harmony with 
a quiet unadorned narrative, yet he cannot refrain 
here and there from some effort in describing common 
things poetically. With Crabbe, a full fish-basket 
would not have been "ocean spoil in ocean-smelling 
osier"; nor would Enoch's face have been " rough- 
reddened with a thousand winter gales," when a 
hundred might have been overmuch for a sailor not 
thirty years old by the story. Nevertheless the 
opening lines have the concise plain-speaking of the 
Suffolk poet, with the same method of grouping details 
in the foreground of a picture ; and with the difference 
that Tennyson widens his prospect, giving it distance 
and air by a sky-line — 

" Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm ; 
And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands ; 
Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf 
In cluster ; then a moulder' d church ; and higher 
A long street climbs to one tall-tower' d mill ; 



114 TENNYSON [chap. 

And high in heaven behind it a gray down 
With Danish barrows. . . . 

******* 

Here on this beach a hundred years ago, 
Three children of three houses, Annie Lee, 
The prettiest little damsel in the port, 
And Philip Ray the miller's only son, 
And Enoch Arden, a rough sailor's lad 
Made orphan by a winter shipwreck, play'd 
Among the waste and lumber of the shore, 
Hard coils of cordage, swarthy fishing-nets, 
Anchors of rusty fluke, and boats updrawn." 

Enoch Arclen marries, but is forced by stress of 
poverty to leave his wife and home on a distant 
voyage. It is when the sailor, escaping from ship- 
wreck, lands alone on a tropical island, that the scene 
begins to glow, and the verses to fill with sound — 

" He could not see the kindly human face, 
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard 
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, 
The league-long roller thundering on the reef, 
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd 
And blossom'd in the zenith." 

And while he wanders under the glare of unclouded 
noonday amid palms and ferns, in the glittering heat 
of land and water, his mind's eye sees his English 
home far away — 

"The chill 
November dawns and dewy-glooming downs, 
The gentle shower, the smell of dying leaves, 
And the low moan of leaden-colour' d seas." 

The tale is founded on an incident that must have 
been common enough in the foretime, particularly 
among seafaring people, when men wandered abroad 
and were lost, or found their way home after many 



iv.] ENOCH ARDEN 115 

years, to be welcomed or disowned by their families 
as the case might be. It is the Odyssey of humble 
mariners, and many traces of it may be found in 
the folklore and in the superstitions of Asia as well 
as of Europe, where the forgotten husband is liable 
to be treated on his reappearance as a ghostly revenant, 
or even as a demon who has assumed a dead man's 
body in order to gain entrance into the house. In 
most of these stories, as in a rude English sea ballad 
that used to be well known, and in an old French 
song of the Breton coast, the Penelope of a small house- 
hold has yielded to her suitors and married again as 
in Enoch Arden, and as in Crabbe's Tale of the Parting 
Hour, where the castaway mariner comes back to find 
his sweetheart an elderly widow. But in the ancient 
epic and also in these folk-tales the next step is for 
the husband to declare his identity and to demand his 
rights most vigorously, as Ulysses did, but as Enoch 
Arden does not. The popular ending, founded prob- 
ably on real life, is that the man who has been sup- 
planted in his absence finally accepts the situation 
and retires disconsolately, or, as in the novel of Gil 
Bias, philosophically. Tennyson has preferred, rightly 
for the purpose of his art, a conclusion of pathetic 
self-sacrifice ; and Enoch, after one sight of his wife 
and children in a cheerful home, which is tenderly 
described, accepts oblivion, and resolves that they 
shall never discover him alive — 

" But if my children care to see me dead, 
Who hardly knew me living, let them come, 
I am their father ; but she must not come, 
For my dead face would vex her after-life." 

The poem has been dramatised in London and New 



116 TENNYSON [chap. 

York, was translated into Latin, and into seven 
different European languages ; while in France alone 
seven translations, most of them annotated, have 
been made; and Professor A. Beljame of the Paris 
University has written a most able study of the 
versification in Enoch Arden. It is indeed an ex- 
cellent piece of work, which for sincerity of feeling, 
distinctness of outline, and restraint in language, may 
be matched with the poem of Dora; while by com- 
paring it with Aylmer's Field, that appeared in the 
same volume, we can take a measure both of Tennyson's 
strength and of his imperfections in the delineation of 
contemporary life, outside the field of romance. 

The story in Aylmer's Field runs upon the same 
theme as in Maude and Locksley Hall, with a variation 
of plot and circumstance. It reproduces the some- 
what commonplace situation of two playmates, boy 
and girl, who fall in love with each other on reaching 
the age of indiscretion, whereupon the rich and haughty 
squire indignantly ejects the young man, breaking off 
the engagement, and breaking his daughter's heart in 
consequence. The lover kills himself, and his brother, 
the parish clergyman, takes the whole miserable affair 
as his text for a sermon that denounces the idols of 
wealth and pedigree, and shows God's punishment upon 
worldly pride. It might be wished that Tennyson, 
whose special talent did not lie in wielding the scourge, 
should have perceived that extreme condemnation of 
this particular kind of social injustice is liable to take 
a false air of sentiment which embarrasses the impres- 
sive treatment of the situation in poetry. 

" Sir Aylmer Aylmer, that almighty man, 
The county God," 



iv.] AYLMER'S FIELD 117 

is too conventional a figure, obviously magnified, and 
has served too long under novel-writers, to be pro- 
moted into the upper rank of poetical characters ; and 
it is ineffectual to write him down " insolent, brainless, 
heartless ... an old pheasant lord and partridge 
breeder," for the lash falls in vain on the back of a 
callous society, to whom worldly considerations for Sir 
Aylmer's motives, if not for his manners, appeal with 
some extenuating force ; and who might rejoin that 
the Lord of Burleigh's marriage with a lowly maiden 
turned out unhappily. Nor is the morality of the 
story indisputable. Is Sir Aylmer's iniquity so deep 
as to justify a poet in bringing down the wrath of God 
upon his head, desolation upon his house, the dilapida- 
tion of his ancient hall, and the extinction of his 
family ? 

' ' The man became 
Imbecile ; his one word was ' desolate ' ; 
Dead for two years before his death was he : 

******* 
Then the great Hall was wholly broken down, 
And the broad woodland parcell'd into farms ; 
And where the two contrived their daughter's good, 
Lies the hawk's cast, the mole has made his run, 

******* 
The slow-worm creeps, and the thin weasel there 
Follows the mouse, and all is open field." 

Purse-pride and the infatuation of social prejudice are 
not sins dark enough for such a tremendous Nemesis ; 
they fall rather within the jurisdiction of the con- 
temptuous satirist, who can sometimes hit the mark 
in one cutting sentence, as when Swift says that you 
can tell what God thinks of wealth by noticing the 
kind of people on whom He thinks fit to bestow it. 



CHAPTER V 

pastorals ; tennyson's philosophy 

Let us turn to another aspect of English life ; for, if 
his studies from the antique be excepted, no great 
English poet has travelled for his subjects more rarely 
beyond his native land than Tennyson. In such poems 
of rural scenery and character as The May Queen and 
The Grandmother, we have the annals of the village, 
in youth and age, told with a sweet and serious feel- 
ing, in flowing monosyllabic lines that affect and cap- 
tivate a reader by their freedom from varnishing or 
emphasis. Their composition has not the unconscious 
simplicity of Auld Robin Gray, where the resemblance 
to a genuine ballad comes from that absence of colour- 
ing adjectives [there is but one in all the eight stanzas] 
which is the note of all primitive and popular verse 
— a woodnote wild that is very seldom caught and 
domesticated by elaborate culture. Tennyson's genius 
was essentially cultivated and picturesque ; he laid on 
his tints with the artistic design of illuminating the 
beauty of quiet nature, or he filled in with descrip- 
tive particulars in order to produce the scene's general 
impression, as in the followiug stanza : — 

"When the flowers come again, mother, beneath the waning 
light 
You'll never see me more in the long gray fields at night ; 
118 



chap, v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 119 

"When from the dry dark wold the summer airs blow cool 
On the oat-grass and the sword-grass, and the bulrush in the 
pool," 

which is in a style quite different from that of un- 
lettered verse-makers. 

Yet the plaintive lament of the May Queen for her 
doom of early death, and the sadness of old age recall- 
ing the memories of youth, are presented with a truth 
and earnestness that touch universal human affections 
and the sense of mortality ; and the language is purely 
poetical, with the same exclusion of dialect or imita- 
tion of rustic talk that is seen in all Wordsworth's 
pastorals. These poems of Tennyson aim at, and do 
not fall far short of, the " simplicity of diction " which 
Wordsworth affirmed that he had introduced into Eng- 
lish verse as the proper medium for rendering the 
elementary feelings of the country-folk and showing 
the poetical aspect of common things. Wordsworth's 
principle, as explained in his Preface to the Lyrical 
Ballads, was to choose incidents and situations of rural 
life, and to describe them as far as possible in the lan- 
guage really used by the people, purified, indeed, from 
grossness and uncouth provincialisms. Good prose, 
he maintained, was the proper vehicle for this kind of 
poetry : his object was to clothe the thoughts and 
characters in plain close-fitting words, adapting the 
speech to the situation. It was not difficult for Cole- 
ridge to prove, in the well-known criticism that is to 
be found in his Biographia Literaria, that language so 
purified was very different from the true vulgar tongue ; 
that Wordsworth, in fact, used good plain English vivi- 
fied and elevated poetically, and was at his worst in 
the lines which come nearest to commonplace rustic 



120 TENNYSON [chap. 

conversation. Moreover, Wordsworth, though he did 
good service in discarding finally the old conventional 
pastoral, diverged habitually into philosophic reflec- 
tions that were manifestly and intentionally out of 
keeping with his rustic characters. In the two poems 
of The May Queen and The Grandmother Tennyson 
makes no pretence of imitating the language of his 
villagers ; his object is to translate their genuine feel- 
ings poetically ; he simplifies his diction and strips it 
of superfluous ornament ; but no man knew better that 
real idiomatic vernacular is a very different thing. 
What this is, and the use that can be made of it, he 
has shown separately. He does not relate a story and 
moralise upon it, as Wordsworth usually did; he 
exhibits dramatic impersonations that portray the 
homely joys and griefs of the peasantry, that show 
how they act and what they say, in language that is 
nevertheless refined, correct, and vivid, and in a style 
which is the poet's own. 

It will perhaps be admitted that this method of 
leaving his personages to speak for themselves was a 
novelty in the lyrics of rusticity. In subsequent poems 
Tennyson went one step further in compliance with the 
modern demand for what is called realism, by trying 
the bold experiment, upon which neither Wordsworth 
nor even Crabbe ever ventured, of making them speak 
in their own rough unpolished vernacular, as if they 
were acting their parts on a stage. This was the final 
death-blow to the tradition of the elegant pastoral. 
We have to remember that Burns was the first poet of 
genius who proved that the strenuous racy speech of 
the people contained elements of high poetic value, 
being of course led to the discovery by the fact that it 



v.] PASTORALS j TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 121 

lay ready to his hand, for he himself was a poet born 
and bred up among the Scottish peasantry. In Scot- 
land, as in the New England of America, there existed 
a true and widespread provincial dialect, which gave 
a national flavour and local associations to verses in 
which it was used; but in England, the home of 
ancient literary culture, the writing of verse in dialect 
or patois had never hitherto been attempted by any of 
the recognised poets (and they are 'numerous) who 
have condescended to the short and simple annals of 
the village. 1 That Tennyson, the mystical romancer, 
the dreamer of fair women, should also have written 
spirited verses full of rude and quaint humour, some- 
times even too redolent of the soil, is a notable exam- 
ple of his versatility. And his Northern Farmer set 
the fashion, in England, of drawing character-sketches 
in rough-hewn verse that imitates not only the speech 
but the accent of all sorts and conditions of unsophis- 
ticated men. It is a form of metrical composition 
that has lately spread, as a species of modern ballad, 
throughout the British Empire and the United States 
of America, but has little or no existence in any 
language except the English. 2 

FitzGerald, after reading the "Holy Grail," writes 
(1870) to Tennyson — 

" The whole myth of Arthur's Round Table Dynasty in 
Britain presents itself before me with a sort of cloudy, Stone- 
henge grandeur. I am not sure if the old Knight's adventures 

1 William Barnes, who first published his poems in the Dorset- 
shire dialect in 1833, can hardly be ranked among the higher 
poets. 

2 Such poems as those of Mistral in the Provencal dialect belong, 
I think, to a different order. 



122 TENNYSON [chap. 

do not tell upon me better, touched in some lyrical way (like 
your own ' Lady of Shalott '), than when elaborated into epic 
form. . . . Anyhow, Alfred, while I feel how pure, noble, 
and holy your work is, and whole phrases, lines, and sentences 
of it will abide with me, and, I am sure, with men after me, 
I read on till the ' Lincolnshire Farmer ' drew tears to my 
eyes. I was got back to the substantial rough-spun Nature 
I knew ; and the old brute, invested by you with the solemn 
humour of Humauity, like Shakespeare's Shallow, became 
a more pathetic phenomenon than the knights who revisit 
the world in your other verse." 

In the two poems of the Northern Farmer, indeed, 
we have verisimilitude of portraiture and authentic 
delineation of character, preserving the type and de- 
veloping its peculiar features by the insight that 
belongs to the observing faculty, with artistic fidel- 
ity in details. Yet the treatment of these subjects 
needs much discrimination and reserve ; for unless 
there is a solid foundation of point and humour, the 
dialect becomes mere jargon; and the particulars must 
never be too inelegant, nor must the verse be over- 
crowded with phonetic pronunciations. The Northern 
Cobbler, which betrays defects of this kind, must be 
ranked, critically, below the Farmer ; and the Village 
Wife has a certain triviality of voluble talk which may 
be true enough to nature, but hardly supports her claim 
to a niche in a poetic gallery of national portraits. 

" 'Ouse-keeper sent tha, my lass, fur New Squire coorn'd last 

night. 
Butter an' heggs — yis — yis. I'll goa wi' tha back ; all 

right ; 
Butter I warrants be prime, an' I warrants the heggs be as 

well, 
Hafe a pint o' milk runs out when ya breaks the shell." 



v.] PASTORALS; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 123 

Take away the queer spelling, and turn the lines into 
ordinary English, and you have commonplace domestic 
prose hardly worth putting into rhyme. By the same 
test The Spinster's Sweet-' Arts must be reckoned 
among the less successful excursions into the field of 
low life, for even there it is dangerous to descend 
among ignoble particulars, and the Art of Sinking 
consists in avoiding degradation — 

" To be horder'd about, an' waaked, when Molly' d put out the 

light, 
By a man coomin' in wi' a hiccup at ony hour o' the 

night ! 
An' the taable staain'd wi' 'is aale, an' the mud o' 'is boots 

o' the stairs, 
An' the stink o' 'is pipe i' the 'ouse, an' the mark o' 'is 'ead 

o' the chairs ! " 

" Hoden Noel," writes Tennyson, " calls the two 
Northern Farmers photography ; but I call them 
imaginative " — as of course they are, being far above 
mere exact presentations of individuals. And in pro- 
portion as photography, the bare indifferent printing 
off of things as they are, predominates in this kind of 
work, it becomes no fit business for a master of poeti- 
cal grace and distinction. Here, again, we may refer to 
Coleridge's criticism on Wordsworth's Preface, where 
he (Wordsworth) explains that he has chosen low and 
rustic subjects, because in that condition the essential 
passions of the heart are less under restraint, and 
speak a plainer and more emphatic language. To this 
Coleridge replies that low and rustic life is in itself 
unpoetic, and that poetry must idealise. Where 
Wordsworth does idealise, he says, his figures have 
the representative quality; where the poet goes too 



124 TENNYSON [chap. 

close to the real native product, as in the " Idiot Boy," 
he becomes commonplace ; and when he describes a 
dull and garrulous man exactly, he becomes himself 
dull. So, also, when Tennyson gives us the vulgar 
tongue in its full flavour, the poetical element is over- 
powered and disappears. 

But if it must be admitted that passages like these 
are blemishes on the picture, "in truth to nature 
missing truth to art," we may regard them as an 
overbalance of Tennyson's proclivities, as lapses on 
the side to which his genius leans. Throughout his 
poetry, from the highest to the humblest subject, 
runs a vivid objectivity ; he sees things in strong 
relief, and they are impressed with a sharp edge 
upon a very receptive mind. Even at the times when 
he is dropping his plummet into the abyss of the 
mysteries that encompass human existence and des- 
tiny, he rarely carries abstract thought to any depth ■ 
he returns to the surface and refreshes himself among 
the forms of the visible world. Here he is in his 
proper domain, in his power of exact delineation, 
of recording briefly the sensation received and re- 
tained, by looking (for example) attentively at a 
wide prospect, and taking out of it the suggestion 
or the similitudes, reading from it the language or 
discourse of Nature. And as in his best work he 
takes accurate notice of minor things, of wild flowers 
and foliage, of a weasel's faint cry or a bird's call, or 
even of a cow's wrinkled throat in the play of sun- 
light, so when he is giving us the rough side of life 
he has occasionally fallen into excess of naturalism 
by his propensity for minute observation of things 
that will not bear inspecting too closely. 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 125 

Yet his pre-eminent gift was for the imaginative 
apprehension of beauty, and his practice is exemplified 
in the record of his journeys. In 1860, for example, 
he made an excursion to Cornwall and the Scilly 
Islands, gathering a harvest of impressions from the 
views of the coast, the cliffs, the long curving sweep 
of the sandy shore, the towering Atlantic breakers, 
and jotting down the " nature-similes," which, be- 
ing afterwards grafted into his verse, became the 
decorative framework that contained and gave a local 
habitation to his Arthurian legends. Then he returned 
to Farringford, with its careless ordered garden close 
to the edge of a noble down, where his friends visited 
him, and listened to his table talk, and heard him 
read his poems. In 1861 he was in Auvergne, sur- 
veying, for the most part silently, the mountains, 
lakes, and torrents ; whence the party travelled south- 
ward to the Pyrenees, meeting Arthur Clongh at 
Luchon, with continual additions throughout the 
journey to the poetic sketch-book. He could thus 
fix in a few words the sensations of the moment, 
fresh and distinct, storing them for eventual use 
either descriptively, as part of a narrative, or as 
metaphors to expand and give forms to a thought. 
It may be noticed, by the way, that the most famous of 
Tennyson's contemporary poets in France worked by 
precisely the same method. Victor Hugo's " Couchers 
du Soleil " are careful studies from nature of the tones 
and forms of a landscape under the setting sun. Both 
these great artists sought to fix accurately the scene, 
and to translate the momentary sensation into accord- 
ance with the thought that it awakened, to use it 
as the background or environment of human action, 



126 TENNYSON [chap. 

or merely to obtain a fresh image for the poetic 
embodiment of an idea, in substitution for images 
that have been worn out or become obsolete by 
long usage. Metaphor lies at the base of all 
language ; and while the first man who spoke of 
running water conveyed his thought by an image 
which invested the stream with a being like his 
own, the poets latterly resorted to metaphor, or to 
myth — which is in their hands metaphor personi- 
fied — as a mere repertory for figurative expression. 
When the thought at once strikes out the image, 
it comes fresher from the mint than when the image 
has been noted and treasured up beforehand for 
illustration of thought or action. It may be observed 
that Tennyson never uses what may be called the 
mythological device ; he never appeals directly to 
the ocean or the mountain as if it were a living 
embodiment of Nature, as Byron does; he absorbs 
and translates the impress of inanimate things upon 
the perceptive mind. A year later we find him 
making similar studies for his poetry from the 
crags and dismantled castles of Derbyshire and York- 
shire. It would seem that his wandering in the 
quiet familiar scenery of England served him best 
in this way; since, if we may judge from a letter 
written immediately after his return from abroad, 
his reminiscences of a journey through France were 
troubled by a kind of resentment against the annoy- 
ances that never failed to discompose him in strange 
lands, and which in this instance appear to have 
affected his health. 

"France, I believe, overset me, and more especially the 
foul ways and unhappy diet of that charming Auvergne ; no 



v.] PASTOEALS; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 127 

amount of granite craters or chestnut-woods, or lava-streams, 
not the Puy de Dome which I climbed, nor the glen of Royat 
where I lived, nor the still more magnificent view of the dead 
volcanoes from the ascent to Mont Dore could make amends 
for those drawbacks ; so we all fell sick by turns. ... I 
remain with a torpid liver, not having much pleasure in 
anything." * 

Nevertheless the course and circumstances of Tenny- 
son's middle life were singularly untroubled and un- 
eventful, leaving few turning-points or landmarks for 
the biographer. From straitened means in youth he 
had now passed to comparative affluence and the seren- 
ity of a well-ordered home ; from distinction within a 
circle of choice friends to celebrity and eminence among 
the poets of his century. At Farringford, though his 
hours of work and meditation were properly set apart, 
his life was by no means secluded. He had many 
visitors and guests to whom he dispensed hospitality, 
and with them held the free discourse and interchange 
of ideas that reveal a man's character and opinions. 
His natural disposition was toward reserve and toward 
a certain taciturnity, that probably came from the 
habit of reflection and of fastidiousness in the choice 
of phrase ; he spoke with intervals of silence. 

After this manner the record of Tennyson's life runs 
in a dignified tranquillity, varied only by incidents that 
attest his established and spreading reputation as an 
illustrious man of letters, known by all Englishmen, 
and whose acquaintance was desired by distinguished 
foreign visitors to his country. In 1864 he received 
at Farringford Garibaldi, who planted a tree in the 
garden, and discoursed with him on Italian poetry. 

1 Memoir. 



128 TENNYSON [chap. 

He writes to the Duke of Argyll : " What a noble 
human being ! I expected to see a hero, and was not 
disappointed. When I asked if he returned through 
France, he said he would never set foot on the soil of 
France again. I happened to make use of the expres- 
sion, ' That fatal debt of gratitude owed by Italy to 
Napoleon.' ' Gratitude/ he said ; < hasn't he had his 
pay, his reward ? If Napoleon were dead, I should be 
glad ; and if I were dead, he would be glad.' " * And 
yet there was prophetic truth in Tennyson's words, 
though not as he meant them; for the debt proved 
fatal, not to Italy, but to Napoleon, whose attachment 
to the cause of Italian liberty drew him into fatal 
complications that hampered all his foreign policy aud 
contributed to his eventual downfall. The Longf ellows 
from America, Professor Owen, Queen Emma of the 
Sandwich Islands, the son of the Abyssinian King 
Theodore, who lost life and kingdom in his war with 
the English, and Mr. Darwin — to whom Tennyson 
said, "Your theory of Evolution does not make against 
Christianity ? " and Darwin answered, " No, certainly 
not" — may be mentioned to exemplify the variety of 
his visitors. We have a journal of a tour to Waterloo, 
with a careful survey of the battlefield, and thence to 
Weimar, where the party saw Goethe's house, with all 
his old boots at the entrance, and Goethe's coffin at 
the Furstengruft. Tennyson joined, as might have 
been expected, the Committee for the defence of 
Governor Eyre, whose figure as the saviour of Jamaica 
struck the hardy temper of the English people, bring- 
ing out their unfailing readiness to pardon doing too 
much a great deal more easily than doing too little in 
1 Memoir. 



v.] PASTORALS; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 129 

a sharp emergency, and to be amazingly indulgent as 
to the methods employed. 

In 1867 Tennyson was in negotiation for the land 
on Blackdown in Surrey, where he afterwards built 
Aldworth, on a site accessible only by a rough track 
across the sandy plateau of the down from the lanes 
above Haslemere; placing the house on a sheltered 
ledge of the uppermost part of the hill's slope south- 
ward, with a broad view over the Sussex weald to 
the South Downs and the sea, and Leith Hill standing 
out on the eastern horizon. Then in 1868-69 he 
went abroad with Mr. Frederick Locker, who has left 
notes on the philosophic discourse, always so attractive 
to Tennyson, that throws many side-lights on his poetry. 
Some of these reminiscences show his mystical pro- 
pensity, the habit of ruminating indecisively over 
speculations which understand all visible things to be 
signs and shadows of things invisible, the intimations 
of eternal Power and Divinity. 1 His thoughts also ran 
upon the limited range of our sense-perceptions, and 
the relativity of our ideas to our ignorance, on Faith 
transcending the bounds of Eeason, and on his own firm 
belief in Love, Virtue, and Duty. His mind wavered 
thus over the face of the deep waters, returning 
always to the solid ground of human affections and 
moral obligations, in accordance with the advice of 
Socrates, that where certainty is unattainable one 
should take the best and most irrefragable of human 
notions, and let this be the raft upon which life's 
voyage is to be made. 

A few lines may be subjoined from the same notes, 
i St. Paul, Romans i. 20. 



130 TENNYSON [chap. 

to show the lighter side of Tennyson's character, 
so well known to all who had the privilege of his 
acquaintance. 

"Balzac's remark that ' Dans tout homme de ge'nie il y a un 
enfant,' may find its illustration in Tennyson. He is the only 
grown-up human being that I know of who habitually thinks 
aloud. His humour is of the dryest, it is admirable. ... He 
tells a story excellently, and has a catching laugh. There are 
people who laugh because they are shy or disconcerted, or for 
lack of ideas . . . only a few because they are happy or 
amused, or perhaps triumphant. Tennyson has an entirely 
natural and a very kindly laugh." x 

It was, indeed, this vein of simplicity, unsophisticated 
by conventionality, that often gave unexpected turns 
to his humour, while it had much to clo with preserving 
that keen sense, or even enjoyment, of ludicrous incon- 
gruities, of the comic effects of indecorum or uncon- 
scious vulgarity, which he himself once noticed in 
Shakespeare. If his laugh was triumphant, it was 
from that sudden glory which Hobbes defines to be 
the cause of laughter at human imperfections ; though 
no one was further above ill-natured scorn than Tenny- 
son, or less prone to harsh judgment upon the ordinary 
follies and eccentricities of men. 

It may be permissible, for the purpose of collating 
the impressions made by Tennyson on those who knew 
him well and saw him often about this time, to add 
here an extract from some recollections of his con- 
versation that have been left by Mr. F. Palgrave — 

" Every one will have seen men, distinguished in some line 
of work, whose conversation (to take the old figure) either 
1 smelt too strongly of the lamp,' or lay quite apart from their 
art and craft. What, through all these years, struck me about 
Tennyson, was that whilst he never deviated into poetical 
1 Memoir. 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 131 

language as such, whether in rhetoric or highly-coloured 
phrase, yet throughout the substance of his talk the same 
mode of thought, the same imaginative grasp of nature, the 
same fineness and gentleness in his view of character, the same 
forbearance and toleration, the aurea mediocritas despised by 
fools and fanatics, which are stamped on his poetry, were con- 
stantly perceptible; whilst in the easy and, as it were, unsought 
choiceness, the conscientious and truth-loving precision of his 
words, the same personal identity revealed itself." 1 

Here we have the large serenity of a poet in whom 
years are strengthening his philosophy of everyday 
life, while he was constantly pondering upon the mys- 
teries which encompass all phenomenal existence. 
In the autumn of 1868, as we learn from a note pre- 
fixed by the editor of the Nineteenth Century review to 
an article, Tennyson and the Kev. Charles Pritchard 
were the guests of Mr. James Knowles ; and as the 
conversation had frequently turned on speculative sub- 
jects, it was suggested that a society might be formed 
"to discuss such questions after the manner and with 
the freedom of an ordinary scientific society." This 
proposal was acted upon, with the result that some of 
the leading representatives of theological opinion, 
scientific research, and philosophic interest came to- 
gether in the Metaphysical Society, of which Mr. Les- 
lie Stephen has observed that four out of five of its 
members knew nothing of metaphysics. We learn 
from Mr. Knowles that the plan came first to be set on 
foot entirely through Tennyson's adhesion to it ; and 
although during the society's existence of twelve years 
his attendance was infrequent — while he usually lis- 
tened silently to the debates — one may guess that the 
papers read or discussed on problems that had always 

1 Memoir. 



132 TENNYSON [chap. 

occupied his mind must have increased their attraction 
for him, and may have influenced the philosophic drift 
of his subsequent poetry. His poem on The Higher 
Pantheism, which he sent to be read before the Society, 
maintains the personality of God apart from the visible 
world, regarding spiritual beings as somehow incom- 
patible with matter. The pure Pantheistic idea is a 
conception of universal Divine immanence, of the in- 
finite interpenetrating the finite ; but this might be held 
to exclude the notion of the world's moral government. 
And Tennyson's Higher Pantheism seems to aim at 
preserving the consciousness of a -discrimination be- 
tween infinite intelligence and the mind, whose 
perception of the finite world involves, or perhaps 
necessitates, a recognition of infinity beyond — 

" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the 
plains — 
Are not these, Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ? 

Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb, 
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from Him ? " 

The soul has broken glimpses of the Divine vision ; 
and the concluding lines — 

" And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot 
see ; 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it not He?" 

might be interpreted as leading up to the doctrine of 
Oriental theosophy — that only by escaping from sen- 
sation, by liberation from the bodily organs, can the 
soul attain clear knowledge of or unity with the Divine 
Being. 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 133 

We know from Tennyson's earlier writings that a 
shadow of despondency and gloom, a sense of the in- 
completeness and failures of life, darkened his medita- 
tions on the condition and prospects of the human 
race ; and his later poems show that he long retained 
this cloudy outlook upon the world. In 1864 he wrote 
an unpublished epigram upon "Immeasurable Sad- 
ness " ; and if a collection were made of his dramatic 
monologues (which would be well worth doing), we 
should find that as time went on he dwelt more and 
more on the unhappiness of mankind. In Locksley 
Hall and Maud we had the vague dispirited murmuring 
of youth against the world's hard discipline ; but we 
also had the lyrics of youthful ardour, love, and beauty. 
In the pastorals we have had the quiet joys and sor- 
rows of the country folk. In his latter-day mono- 
logues the tragic view of things appears to spread and 
deepen ; not vague discontent, but actual misery and 
anguish are his themes; the agony of Eizpah; the 
remorse, in The Wreck, of one who deserted her hus- 
band and lost her child ; the vain repentance, in The 
First Quarrel, of a widow who parted with her husband 
in foolish anger — 

"An' the wind began to rise, an' I thought of him out at sea, 
An' I felt I had been to blame ; he was always kind to me. 
4 Wait a little, my lass, I am sure it 'ill all come right' — 
An' the boat went down that night — the boat went down that 
night." 

The Children's Hospital is full of pain and tears; 
while in Despair we have the fury of a man half 
crazed by misfortune, who has been resuscitated after 
trying to drown himself. Instead of depicting a 
mood, a reverie, or a type of character, he now takes 



134 TENNYSON [chap. 

up a striking anecdote of actual crime or suffering, 
and gives full play to his keen sensibility by a dramatic 
impersonation of the strongest emotions. The most 
poignant situation, more powerfully rendered than any 
other, is in Eizpah, where a mother has gathered up 
the fleshless bones of her son who has been hanged in 
chains for a robbery, and she hears the night-wind 
bring down his piteous cries to her : — 

" Wailing, wailing, wailing, the wind over land and sea — 
And Willy's voice in the wind — 'O mother, come out 

tome.' 
Why should he call me to-night, when he knows that I cannot 

go? 
For the downs are as bright as day, and the full moon stares 

at the snow. 

1 ' We should be seen, my dear ; they would spy us out of the town. 
The loud black nights for us, and the storm rushing over the 

down, 
When I cannot see my own hand, but am led by the creak of 

the chain, 
And grovel and grope for my son till I find myself drenched 

with the rain." 

It is a cruel story, barely fit for poetry, since the 
simple facts are so heartrending as to leave little scope 
for imaginative execution. Yet the long moaning lines 
have the sound of misery ; the details are worked up 
with unflinching precision ; and the sensation of utter 
grief, beyond all comfort or cure, is very forcibly 
conveyed. For a comparison of style, between the 
elaborate and the primitive, we may turn to the tale 
of Eizpah, the daughter of Aiah, told in the ancient 
chronicle with all the power of a few plain words, 
without ornament or commentary; a sight as it was 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 135 

seen on the Syrian hills, when the seven sons of Saul 
were hanged in propitiation of divine wrath, to stay 
the famine. 

If we may now endeavour to sketch out some general 
view of Tennyson's attitude toward the great problems 
of human existence, it becomes necessary to read to- 
gether, in this connection, the poems that he published 
at different times in his later years. In Tennyson's 
Eizpah we have a helpless woman crushed by a calamity 
that she could not avert; our compassion for her is 
unqualified. In Despair, on the other hand, we have 
a case of mental pathology ; we are back again among 
intellectual difficulties : we have to consider the ethics 
of the situation, and to suspend our sympathy until 
we can satisfy ourselves that a man deserves it who 
would fling away his own life and his wife's because 
he has lost faith in God, is miserable in this world, 
and expects nothing from the world to come : — 

"He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of 

fire, 
The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its 

desire — 
Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down 

by the strong, 
Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder, and 

wrong." 

Here indeed we have the lyric of despair, and the 
force of language has been strained to its uttermost 
pitch in expressing it. Yet we are not so carried 
away by the rush of the daring verse as to read with- 
out impatience the violent railing against all things 
human and divine by which this poor fellow seeks to 
excuse a somewhat abject surrender to misfortune and 



136 TENNYSON [chap. 

materialism. Self-respect and the stoical temper unite 
to disown his behaviour ; and the stress laid throughout 
the poem on the disastrous consequences of unbelief 
creates a suspicion that these frenzied denunciations 
are delivered with an eye on an audience; for the 
desperate half-drowned man makes shrewd hits at 
infidel science and strikes out against Calvinistic 
Theology. 

" What ! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us 

so well ? 
Infinite cruelty rather that made everlasting Hell, 
Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does what he will 

with his own ; 
Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan." 

An argumentative intention underlies the rhapsody, 
weakens the logic of the situation, and produces a 
sense of dramatic insincerity. In one single line by 
Keats, "Here, where men sit and hear each other 
groan," there is a deeper echo of human misery than 
in all this declamation, which belongs rather to the 
preacher than to the poet. But it reflects the shade 
of alarm that seems to have continually darkened 
Tennyson's mind when he brooded over subjects of 
this kind. In religion he was an optimist, holding a 
firm belief in the divine wisdom and goodness ; though 
the aspect and course of Nature appears to have alter- 
nately encouraged and disheartened him; her calm 
beauty was seen to cover unmerciful indifference ; and 
formal theology brought him no consolation. His 
imagination was haunted by a fear that scientific teach- 
ing would extinguish belief in a spiritual life to come, 
and would leave mankind desolate in a vast universe. 
One evening, we are told in the Memoir, 



v.] PASTORALS; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 137 

" he was talking on death, and quoting a Parisian story of a 
man having deliberately ordered and eaten a good dinner, and 
having afterwards committed suicide by covering his face with 
a chloroformed handkerchief. ' That's what I should do,' he 
said, ' if I thought there was no future life.' " 

The remark, though recorded, can hardly have been 
made seriously ; but it contains in essence the senti- 
ment of his poem Despair, the sombre conception of 
pessimism as almost a justification of suicide. Unless 
the miserable condition of the masses can be improved 
— if want, unhappiness, and squalor are ineradicable, 
as they seem to be — the world, for the greater number 
of mankind, may as well end at once instead of rolling 
on through immense periods. And even if we are 
gradually advancing to a higher and happier life for 
all, what is the use of Progress if its end is to be a 
final extinction of all animated existence upon this 
planet ? These are the two currents of thought that 
appear to have perplexed Tennyson's meditations, and 
to run through such poems as Despair, and through 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After 1 — 

"Is it well that while we range with Science, glorying in the 
Time, 
City children soak and blacken soul and sense in city 
slime ? 

"There among the glooming alleys Progress halts on palsied 
feet, 
Crime and hunger cast our maidens by the thousand on the 
street." 

And he still harps, in the same poem, on his feeling 
of the inutility of human effort, on his fear lest the 
dominion of science should deaden our spiritual aspira- 
1 1887. 



138 TENNYSON [chap. 

tions; he reminds us that our transitory existence 
in time is little worth, that progress and human per- 
fectibility are illusions, and the world's history a tale 
of unmeaning bustle and agitation, signifying nothing, 
unless we keep alive the spiritual instincts and the 
hope of immortality — 

"Truth, for Truth is Truth, he worshipt, being true as he was 
brave ; 
Good, for Good is Good, he follow'd, yet he look'd beyond the 
grave, 

" Wiser there than you, that crowning barren Death as lord of 
all, 

Deem this over-tragic drama's closing curtain is the pall ! 

****"*** 

" Gone for ever ! Ever ? no — for since our dying race began, 

Ever, ever, and for ever was the leading light of man. 

******* 

" Truth for truth, and good for good ! The Good, the True, the 
Pure, the Just — 
Take the charm ' Eor ever ' from them, and they crumble into 
dust." 

The stanzas have the rhythmic swell and regular 
fall of a chant by some prophetic seer looking back- 
ward and forward over the procession of ages, the 
spectator of all time and all existence, who distrusts 
the advance of civilisation, disdains mere physical 
betterment, and foretells dire conflicts in which the 
nobler qualities of man may perish in strife against 
misrule and sensuality. Toward the end comes a 
gentler and more hopeful note ; yet the burden of the 
poem is still, as with In Memoriam, the oppressive 
immensity of space and time, in which religions and 
philosophic systems are lost like planks in an ocean, 
and those who cling to them are tossed about until 
they drop into the depths — 



v.] PASTORALS; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 139 

"Forward, backward, backward, forward, in the immeasur- 
able sea, 
Sway'd by vaster ebbs and flows than can be known to you 
or me. 

" All the suns — are these but symbols of innumerable man, 
Man or Mind that sees a shadow of the planner or the plan ? 

******* 

"What are men that He should heed us? cried the king of 
sacred song ; 
Insects of an hour, that hourly work their brother insect 
wrong, 

" While the silent Heavens roll, and Suns along their fiery way, 
All their planets whirling round them, flash a million miles 
a day. 

"Many an iEon moulded earth before her highest, man, was 
born, 
Many an iEon too may pass when earth is manless and 
forlorn." 

Among these illimitable periods a life of seventy or 
eighty years is as nothing, and human efforts and 
aspirations sink into insignificance ; yet the old squire 
has the consolation that it is something to have had 
one's day, to have shared the lot of mankind and to 
have helped one's neighbours, and to stand at life's 
close in the old house, which is full of early memories 
of joy and sorrow. And so falls the curtain on 
Locksley Hall, the conclusion of a romantic drama 
that runs in a fragmentary way through so many of 
Tennyson's poems. If we connect the scattered links, 
we have the conception of fretful youth with ardent 
hopes and ambitions, of a passionate attachment that 
is broken off rudely and violently, of revolt against 
social injustice, of long wrestling with the spectres 



140 TENNYSON [chap. 

of intellectual doubt and depression, of gradual 
schooling under the world's hard discipline, and of 
an old age passing quietly amid the scenes of boy- 
hood, still troubled by the unintelligible enigma of 
the Universe, but with a softened retrospect over 
the past, and with such resignation as may be got 
from trusting that the immeasurable course of Evolu- 
tion may tend to some far distant state of rest and 
happiness. 

In Vastness 1 the figure of individual man has 
disappeared, and we have the same gloomy panorama 
of human energy and suffering contemplated from the 
point of its utter vanity and nothingness. The full 
organ-notes reverberate in lines that touch the highest 
scale of sublimity and grandeur in Tennyson's verse ; 
but the poem is too heavily charged with contrasted 
images, and the light is too lurid — 

"Raving politics, never at rest — as this poor earth's pale 
history runs, — 
What is it all "but a trouble of ants in the gleam of a million 
million of suns ? 

* * ***** 

" What the philosophies, all the sciences, poesy, varying voices 
of prayer ? 
All that is noblest, all that is basest, all that is filthy with all 
that is fair ? 

"What is it all, if we all of us end but in being our own 
corpse-coffins at last, 
Swallow'd in Vastness, lost in Silence, drown'd in the deeps 
of a meaningless past ? " 

The feeling that man is but dust and shadow, animated 

for a brief moment, that he is born to sorrow, and 

i 1889. 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 141 

that his works perish, is primeval in poetry and in 
religion ; the starry heavens suggested it to the ancient 
sages and preachers no less vividly than all the dis- 
coveries of astronomy and geology. They confronted 
the eternal silences mournfully, yet with tranquil in- 
trepidity ; they drew lessons of composure and ethical 
fortitude from the spectacle ; they used it to rebuke 
cowardly fear and superstition. In the East they 
relied upon the soul's gradual emancipation until 
it should escape into immateriality from the demon 
that afflicts it with sensation. If the modern poet's 
imagination appears more overpowered by alarm, by 
a kind of terror lest the mainsprings of our moral and 
spiritual activities should give way, we have to con- 
sider that the tremendous expansion of the scientific 
record in these latter days seems to have affected 
Tennyson like a sentence of inflexible predestination, 
overshadowing his delight in the world's glories by a 
foreknowledge of its inevitable doom. The vision 
which unrolled itself before his imagination, of the 
blind mechanical evolution of a world " dark with 
griefs and graves," of human energy squandered on a 
planet that is passing from fire to frost, evidently fas- 
cinated his mind more and more, and possessed it with 
dismay. That mankind and their works must perish, 
slowly or suddenly, leaving not a wrack behind, has 
been the warning of all religions, the foundation of all 
beliefs in a future life ; and the poem of Vastness gives 
the same warning in the terms of science, but without 
the same clear note of intrepidity, or of confidence 
in revealed promises. Yet Tennyson has his antidote 
to Despair. Amid the general shipwreck of positive 
creeds, formal theologies, political and philosophic 



142 TENNYSON [chap. 

systems, all of them powerless to affect man's ultimate 
destiny, we have gleams of spiritual illumination seen 
on the far-distant horizon ; we have a profound faith 
in the moral direction of cosmic laws, in a spiritual 
basis of all being, in a kinship and affinity between the 
spiritual element in man and the divine soul which 
moves the whole universe. He believes with Coleridge 
that the world of sense is in some manner the mani- 
festation of supersensual realities. That Love is 
stronger than Death, and in some form or feeling 
will survive it, is the idea that was expressed in some 
of the most musical and melancholy stanzas of "In 
Memoriam " — 

" Yet if some voice that man could trust 
Should murmur from the narrow house, 
' The cheeks drop in ; the body bows ; 
Man dies : nor is there hope in dust : ' 

" Might I not say ? ' Yet even here, 
But for one hour, O Love, I strive 
To keep so sweet a thing alive : ' 
But I should turn mine ears and hear 

" The moanings of the homeless sea, 

The sound of streams that swift or slow 
Draw down iEonian hills, and sow 
The dust of continents to be ; 

"And Love would answer with a sigh, 
' The sound of that forgetful shore 
Will change my sweetness more and more, 
Half -dead to know that I shall die.' 

" O me, what profits it to put 

An idle case ? If Death were seen 
At first as Death, Love had not been, 
Or been in narrowest working shut." 



v.] PASTOKALS; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 143 

And in Akbar's Dream, 1 written many years after- 
ward, we have the mystic's invocation of Allah as the 

Sun of Love — 

' ' But dimly seen 
Here, till the mortal morning mists of earth 
Fade in the noon of heaven, when creed and race 
Shall bear false witness, each of each, no more, 
But find their limits by the larger light, 
And overstep them, moving easily 
Thro' after-ages in the love of Truth, 
The truth of Love." 

He believes that the deepest human affections are signs 
and symbols of our participation in something divine. 
The Ancient Sage, another poem that appeared 
toward the close of Tennyson's life, is perhaps the 
least indefinite exposition of his hopeful philosophy. 
He touches here upon the conviction, so prevalent 
in Oriental mysticism, that the entire phantasmagoria 
of sense perception is essentially deceptive and unsub- 
stantial, an illusion that will vanish with nearer and 
clearer apprehension of the Divine Presence which 
sustains the whole system of being — 

" If the Nameless should withdraw from all 
Thy frailty counts most real, all thy world 
Might vanish like thy shadow in the dark." 

We are now in darkness, but larger knowledge may 

come — 

" And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet 
No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore 
Await the last and largest sense to make 
The phantom walls of this illusion fade, 
And show us that the world is wholly fair." 

The faint recollections that flit through the brain 
1 1892. 



144 TENNYSON [chap. 

in childhood are described in lines which have all 
Tennyson's delicate susceptibility to the lightest 
impressions of the eye or ear — 

" The first gray streak of earliest summer-dawn, 
The last long stripe of waning crimson gloom, 
As if the late and early were but one — 
A height, a broken grange, a grove, a flower 
Had murmurs ' Lost and gone and lost and gone ! ' 
A breath, a whisper — some divine farewell — 
Desolate sweetness — far and far away." 

It may be a world of flitting shadows, yet there is 
work to be done, and light beyond — 

" Let be thy wail, and help thy fellow men." 

Amid the scenes of lust and luxury, which chain down 
the soul — 

"Look higher, then — perchance — thou mayest — beyond 
A hundred ever-rising mountain lines 
And past the range of Night and Shadow — see 
The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day 
Strike on the Mount of Vision." 

There is hesitation in the Sage's accents ; and the poet 
can do little more than enjoin us to follow the gleams 
of light that pierce the clouds which envelop our mortal 
existence. Science threatens to keep us wandering in 
an interminable labyrinth. Yet Science may be a 
symbolical language shadowing forth divine truths, a 
cypher by which those who have the key may read, 
in glimpses and occasional rays of light, a message 
of secret encouragement ; and Evolution, a theory of 
futile transformations in the physical order, may be 
typical of the upward striving and gradual eman- 
cipation of man as a spiritual being. Some such 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 145 

conclusions as these we can extract and piece together 
from Tennyson's later meditations ; and if they are not 
always distinct and coherent, we have to remember 
that systematic philosophy lies outside the proper 
range of a poet's art or his mission. 

In Tiresias the poet goes back again to antiquity, 
to the legend of the blind prophet who is in communion 
with the deities, and who, when Thebes is beleaguered 
and about to fall, proclaims the Divine decree that 
one man must devote himself to death for the salvation 
of his state and people. We have in this story the 
inveterate belief in the efficacy of human sacrifice that 
has run through the superstitions of all ages and 
countries ; it contains the moral idea of self-devotion 
mixed up with the notion that the angry gods may 
be appeased by a precious victim; and the modern 
poet transfigures the legend into a lofty encomium 
upon the glory of patriotic martyrdom — 

"My son, 
No sound is breathed so potent to coerce, 
And to conciliate, as their names who dare 
For that sweet mother land which gave them birth 
Nobly to do, nobly to die. Their names, 
Graven on memorial columns, are a song 
Heard in the future ; few, but more than wall 
And rampart, their examples reach a hand 
Far thro' all years, and everywhere they meet 
And kindle generous purpose, and the strength 
To mould it into action pure as theirs." 

It is refreshing, after the dreary visions of a ruined 
and silent world, of the inutility of all human effort, 
and of the cold eschatology predicted by Science, to 
look back again in Tiresias on the ancient world, 
to a time when men were citizens of a petty state 



146 TENNYSON [chap. 

instead of a vast empire, trained to meet real perils 
with fortitude and endurance, thinking always of 
the fortunes of their people, and knowing nothing of 
the remote destinies of mankind, nor balancing two 
worlds, the present and the future, against each other. 
In such conditions of existence their joys and griefs, 
their fears and hopes, were simple, direct, and con- 
fined within a narrow compass. As the idea of 
progress and the perfectibility of society had 
little or no hold on them, so they were not deeply 
discomposed by the knowledge that all things are 
mutable and transitory. As their minds were neither 
troubled by the prospect of an immeasurable future 
for the earth, nor by the discovery of its remote past, 
so they could concentrate their efforts and aspirations 
on the ideals which ennoble the present life, on courage, 
temperance, and justice, on making the best of it by 
harmonising the inevitable conditions of existence. To 
the poets and philosophers of antiquity, who knew well 
that the highest truths lie beyond experience, the 
rebellious outburst of Despair and the blank dismay 
of Yastness would have appeared irrational and pro- 
foundly inconsistent with the sense of duty and virtue, 
tending to obliterate the distinctions of good and evil, 
and to degrade all human society to the level of insects. 
From the prison-house of materialism Tennyson him- 
self found release in his firm trust that all things are 
divinely ordered, and that annihilation is inconceivable ; 
yet his reflections on death are constantly tinged with 
misgivings. The verses added as an epilogue to 
Tiresias have the full spontaneous flow in perfect 
measure, with a sure echoing stroke of the rhymes, 
that attest consummate workmanship. In the prel- 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 147 

ude he had greeted his old friend, Edward FitzGerald : 
and when he wrote these final stanzas he had heard of 
his death — 

" The tolling of his funeral bell 

Broke on my Pagan Paradise. 
******* 
Gone into darkness, that full light 

Of friendship ! past, in sleep, away 
By night, into the deeper night ! 

The deeper night ? A clearer day 
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth — 

If night, what barren toil to be ! 
What life, so maim'd by night, were worth 
Our living out ? Not mine to me." 

"The doubtful doom of human kind" haunts his 

imagination ; he dwells upon the idea that Song will 

vanish in the Vast, will end in stillness, and he 

glances back regretfully at the pagan paradise — at 

those who 

" Scarce could see, as now we see, 

The man in Space and Time, 
So drew perhaps a happier lot 

Than ours, who rhyme to-day. 
The fires that arch this dusky dot — 

Yon myriad-worlded way — 
The vast sun-clusters' gather'd blaze, 

World-isles in lonely skies, 
Whole heavens within themselves, amaze 

Our brief humanities." 

The conclusion, sooner or later, of the human drama, 
the finality of all earthly existence — these ideas have 
been the articles of primary belief in every religion, 
and belong to the presentiments and expectations that 
are natural to the human mind, for we are surrounded 
by decay and death, and the illimitable is an incon- 



148 TENNYSON [chap. 

ceivable idea. But in apocalyptic predictions the 
earth itself was to be destroyed and disappear with all 
it contained, was to founder like a ship in mid-ocean, 
or like a volcanic island sinking suddenly. It is the 
prospect of this planet, a minute and negligible part 
of the universe, rolling round in its diurnal course 
after man and his works have vanished, of inanimate 
matter surviving with entire unconcern all vital ener- 
gies, that seems to have oppressed the poet with dejec- 
tion at the thought of mortal man's utter insignificance. 
In this mood life lost for him all interest and mean- 
ing, except through faith in the perpetuation of the 
spiritual particle; and his own quotation from Mar- 
veil indicates the prevailing bent of his reflections — 

"At my back I always hear 
Time's winged chariot hurrying near, 
And yonder all before us lie 
The deserts of eternity." 

To such feelings his poetry gave sublimity and a 
transcendent range of contemplation; yet it must be 
remarked that they have a tendency to weigh down the 
mainsprings of human activity. They are akin to the 
subtle opiates of Oriental philosophy, which teaches 
the nothingness of sensuous life ; but fortunately the 
energetic races of the world are not easily discouraged. 
For it is the inevitability of death that gives a stim- 
ulus to life ; and strenuous minds draw a motive for 
exertion, for working while the light lasts, from that 
very sense of the brevity of human existence and the 
uncertainty of what may lie beyond, which, although 
Tennyson fought against it manfully, did undoubtedly 
haunt his meditations and depress the spirit of his 
later inspirations. - He relied, indeed, upon the sense 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 149 

of right, of duty, and of trust in the final purpose of a 
Creator ; nevertheless, he seems to have been continu- 
ally disturbed by the fear lest the scientific forecast 
of blank desolation for this planet, and the uncertainty 
of a future conscious existence for mankind, might 
fatally weaken the power of these high motives to 
fortify human conduct, and to sustain virtue.- Yet in 
the four volumes of Jowett's Plato, which he received 
from the translator in 1871, he must have found — 
not only in the dialogues, but also in Jowett's charac- 
teristic commentaries — that loftier conception of ser- 
vice in the cause of truth and humanity, which can 
inspire men to go forward undauntedly, whatever may 
be their destiny beyond the grave. 

In discussing Tennyson's poetry and his intellectual 
tendencies it has been necessary to disregard chrono- 
logical sequence and to anticipate, for the purpose of 
a connected survey. We must now take up again 
the chronicle of his elder life, which is very slightly 
marked by events, except when increasing years 
brought ever-rising fame and public honours. In 1869 
he was made an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, 
Cambridge; and in 1873 Mr. Gladstone proposed a 
baronetcy, but such promotion had evidently no at- 
traction for him. In 1874 this offer was repeated by 
Mr. Disraeli (who does not seem to have been aware 
that it had been already made) in a high-flying senten- 
tious letter, evidently attuned to the deeper harmonies 
of the mysterious relations between genius and gov- 
ernment. 

"A government should recognize intellect. It elevates 
and sustains the spirit of a nation. But it is an office not 



150 TENNYSON [chap. 

easy to fulfil ; for if it falls into favouritism and the pat- 
ronage of mediocrity, instead of raising the national senti- 
ment, it might degrade and debase it. Her Majesty, by the 
advice of Her Ministers, has testified in the Arctic expedi- 
tion, and will in other forms, her sympathy with science. 
But it is desirable that the claims of high letters should be 
equally acknowledged. This is not so easy a matter, 
because it is in the nature of things that the test of merit 
cannot be so precise in literature as in science. Neverthe- 
less, etc., etc." 1 

The honour was nevertheless again respectfully de- 
clined, with a suggestion, pronounced by authority to 
be impracticable, that it might be reserved for confer- 
ment upon his son after his own death. 

Mrs. Tennyson's journal for this time — when they 
lived alternately between Farringford and Aldworth, 
making an annual visit to London — is full of interest, 
recording various sayings and doings, conversation, 
correspondence, anecdotes, and glimpses of notable 
visitors — Tourgueneff, Longfellow, Jenny Lind, Hux- 
ley, and Gladstone, to the last of whom he read aloud 
the Holy Grail. At the house of G. H. Lewes he read 
Guinevere, which made George Eliot weep ; and at 
home he was visited by General Charles Gordon, to 
whom the poems were a solace and a delight in peril- 
ous days at Khartoum. There was a project of bring- 
ing about a meeting with Newman, between whom and 
Tennyson an exchange, or possibly a collision, of phil- 
osophic ideas would have been well worth recording ; 
but nothing came of it, and the meeting remains a 
good subject for an Imaginary Conversation. For 
Tennyson's table-talk at this period readers must go 
to the Memoir, from which it would be unfair to pick 
1 Memoir. 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 151 

many sayings or anecdotes wherewith to season these 
pages. He had much of the epigrammatic faculty ; 
he could condense a criticism into a few words, as 
when he said that Miss Austen understood the small- 
ness of life to perfection ; he could put colour into it, 
as when he remarks that poets enrich the blood of the 
world ; and he could frame a thought, not always in 
itself very precious, with great felicity. Of amusing 
anecdotes that struck his fancy, or were collected by 
his friends to show the wide popularity of his poems, 
there are many ; for at Farringf ord he was the cyno- 
sure of neighbouring eyes, while he was hunted by 
tourists abroad, and at home the visitors sat at his 
feet. He had indeed at this time to pass the ordeal 
of somewhat unqualified adulation, though one inti- 
mate friend, Mrs. Cameron, never failed to speak out 
her mind. His discourses on poetry, with his favour- 
ite quotations, prove a keen discrimination of literary 
quality, with a mastery of technique that is the gift 
of a practical artist. Among his quotations may be 
noticed, as a curiosity, the lines from Henry VIII. 1 : — 

"To-day, the French, 
All clinquant, all in gold, like heathen gods, 
Shone down the English ; and, to-morrow, they 
Made Britain, India," 

where Shakespeare, in his large manner of illustrating 
the Oriental glitter of the English array on the Field 
of the Cloth of Gold, writes as one suddenly possessed 
by the 

"prophetic soul 
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come," 

1 Act i. Scene i. 



152 TENNYSON [chap. 

and falls unconsciously into a vision of the future. 
For nearly two centuries later it was the contest 
between France and England in the East that did 
actually and directly lead to the making of British 
India. 

The diary is a faithful and valuable memorial of 
English country life at its best toward the last quarter 
of the nineteenth century. Living quietly with his 
family, he was in constant intercourse with the most 
distinguished men of his day, and was himself honoured 
of them all; a society that gave him all that he 
desired, and not more than he most undoubtedly 
deserved. 

In 1878 came the marriage of his younger son 
Lionel to Miss Locker. Seven years afterward, in 
1885, they made a journey to India, where Lionel 
unfortunately caught a fever of which he died on 
the homeward voyage. Tennyson's verses To the 
Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, always the most 
largehearted and generous of friends, acknowledge 
the kindness and unmeasured hospitality which his 
son received during his illness from the Viceroy of 
India — 

11 But while my life's late eve endures, 
Nor settles into hueless gray, 
My memories of his briefer day 
Will mix with love for you and yours." 

With Carlyle Tennyson remained in constant inter- 
course personally, and with FitzGerald by letters, ex- 
cept for a short visit to him at Woodbridge in 1876 — 
" the lonely philosopher, a ' man of humorous-melan- 
choly-mark,' with his gray floating locks, sitting among 
his doves." They never met again afterwards. It is a 



v.] PASTORALS ; TENNYSON'S PHILOSOPHY 153 

rarity in modern life that two such men as Tennyson 
and FitzGerald, whose mutual friendship was never 
shaken, should have met but once in twenty-five 
years of life, although divided by no longer space 
than could be traversed by a three hours' railway 
journey. In FitzGerald's judgment Tennyson reached 
the grand climacteric of his poetry in the volumes 
of 1842, for the Idylls, and the later moral and 
didactic strain of verse, were not to his taste ; though 
in 1873 he wrote to Tennyson, who had sent him 
Gareth and Lynette, that he admired many passages 
in the Idylls. It may be true, as is remarked in the 
Memoir, that FitzGerald's sequestered way of life 
kept him in a critical groove, and that he was crotch- 
ety is confessed by himself. Nevertheless, in the unani- 
mous chorus of applause from all the illustrious men 
of that time, the dissentient voice of the scholarly 
recluse, always admiring and affectionate, was worth 
listening to; and many may question whether the 
settled opinion of a later generation will find much 
fault with it. 



CHAPTER VI 



THE PLAYS 



When Tennyson, in 1875, brought out his play of 
Queen Mary, he made his entry upon a field into 
which no first-class English poet had ventured for a 
long time previously. Coleridge's play of Remorse 
had a fair run, because it was written down to the 
level of popular taste ; and his poetic genius had little 
to do with its success. Shelley and Byron wrote 
dramatic poetry, and Shelley believed that The Cenci 
was well fitted for the stage, but it never appeared on 
the boards, although the figure of Beatrice is undoubt- 
edly drawn with great tragic power. Byron openly 
declared that his dramas were not written with the 
slightest view to the stage ; and, in short, we must go 
back to Goldsmith for a poet who was also a successful 
plaj^wright. None of these poets had taken their plots 
or characters from English history ; so that there was 
novelty in Tennyson's design of continuing the line of 
Shakespeare's English chronicle-plays by dramatising 
great periods of our history. In France the historic 
drama came in for a few years with Victor Hugo and 
the romanticists; yet it may be affirmed that no 
French dramatist of the first order has ever founded a 
play on the annals of France ; and we may suppose 
that the classic taste and style, which rejects details 
and local colouring, dealing in noble sentiments rhetori- 

154 



chap, vi.] THE PLAYS 155 

cally delivered, had discouraged and thrown out of 
fashion any attempt to exhibit on the stage famous 
national events and personages, surrounding them with 
the variety of character and circumstance that belong 
to real life. Mrs. Tennyson notes in her diary for 
April 1874 that her husband had thought of William 
the Silent as the subject for a play ; but had said that 
our own history was so great, and that he liked English 
subjects and knew most about them, so that he had 
begun Queen Mary. 

From the point of view taken in the foregoing 
observations, therefore, we have a new departure in 
this play, which introduces us to that most critical 
epoch in the history of the English people, when vio- 
lent religious changes, a doubtful succession to the 
crown, and foreign marriages had spread terror, sus- 
picion, and discord throughout England and Scotland, 
producing that fermentation of conspiracies, rebellions, 
and persecutions which is generated by a mixture of 
religion and politics at a high temperature. The car- 
dinal point of the situation was that in the middle of 
the sixteenth century the successions to both the 
English and Scottish crowns had fallen to daughters ; 
and that this had occurred almost simultaneously with 
the culmination of the great revolt against the Papacy, 
with the fierce religious wars in western Europe, and 
with the contest between France and Spain for ascen- 
dency. The Emperor Charles V. married his son to 
Mary Tudor of England in order to secure an English 
alliance. As a counter move, Henry II. of France 
married the Dauphin to Mary Stuart of Scotland ; and 
so the two Catholic queens, representing antagonistic 
politics, were ruling two kingdoms, in both of which 



156 TENNYSON [chap. 

a powerful party of nobles, with strong popular sup- 
port, were stubborn adherents of the Eeforniation. 

14 Mary of Scotland, married to your Dauphin, 
Would make our England, France ; 
Mary of England, joining hands with Spain, 
Would be too strong for France." 1 

No more arduous or complicated position, sure to de- 
velop character, has fallen to the lot of women than 
that of either Queen. Mary Stuart's life and death 
were infinitely the more romantic and pitiful ; a beau- 
tiful frail woman swept onward as if by Fate to death 
on the scaffold, a sacrifice to implacable policy, fulfils 
the highest conditions of a tragic drama. Shakespeare 
might have written it, if she had not been so nearly of 
his own time. On the other hand, there is no romance, 
no play of wild passion, no fateful catastrophe, in the 
life of Mary Tudor ; she had a touch of her father's 
courage, but also of his cruelty ; she was a dull woman 
with no feminine charm ; her reign was ' one long 
failure ; and she left the grand part in history to be 
taken up and played royally by her sister Elizabeth. 
One might therefore say that Tennyson, in fixing upon 
Queen Mary and her reign, had chosen a difficult 
subject for the theatre, since the leading character is 
neither heroic nor intensely pathetic j she was a mis- 
erable disappointed woman whose name has an indel- 
ible stain of blood upon it. Nevertheless Tennyson's 
play is a dramatic reading of authentic history, exe- 
cuted with much animation and with imaginative force 
in the presentation of character. Although the interest 
in the story belongs rather to the events and circum- 
1 Act i. Scene y. 



vi.] THE PLAYS 157 

stances than to the persons, yet the poet fills in skil- 
fully the historic outlines ; he gives elevation to the 
speeches and sentiments ; he realises for us the motives 
and actions of men and women who paid forfeit for a 
lost cause at the stake or on the scaffold ; he exhibits 
lively pictures of the court and the street. He con- 
trives to invest Mary with some dignity, and to extract 
from us some scanty sympathy with her unhappiness ; 
though it is impossible to make of her the central 
figure on which the eyes of an audience should be 
riveted as the action proceeds. The main interest is 
rather political than personal. Cranmer, Gardiner, 
Wyatt, White the Lord Mayor, Paget and Pole, 
Noailles and Eenard, pass over the stage and discharge 
their historical parts in speeches full of concise and 
characteristic expression ; but to bring all these parts 
into dramatic unity, and to make an imaginative 
plot out of a page of familiar history, was probably 
beyond the power even of first-rate genius. Tennyson 
himself perceived that the older chronicles, which pre- 
served only the striking features of the time, allowed 
greater scope to the creative faculty than a precise 
knowledge of men and events which binds a poet down 
to the facts, for the necessity of being accurate im- 
pairs the illusion ; and the historical dramatist finds 
himself more at ease in a distant half -known age, or 
anywhere else than in his own country. Mary Stuart 
and Mary Tudor have been brought on the stage by 
foreigners, Schiller and Victor Hugo, in the latter case 
with indifferent success. Moreover, although broad 
colours and circumstantial details give the scenes a 
realistic impressiveness, they rather detract from the 
universality so to speak, which is the attribute of a 



158 TENNYSON [chap. 

great drama. Shakespeare's finest plays are inde- 
pendent of and disregard such accessories. 

Nevertheless the portrait painting, under these 
inevitable limitations, is very well done, and it 
illuminates an eventful period. The priests, states- 
men, and martyrs of Mary's short and troubled reign 
stand out in clear relief ; the strong light thrown upon 
their figures discloses the intrigues and clashing poli- 
tics of a time when the balance seemed to hang even 
between the old faith and the new, just when the 
Spanish marriage was adding a heavy weight to the 
side of Rome. Paget, Howard, Wyatt, and Bagenhall 
represent the Englishman of that day for whom reli- 
gion was a question of politics. Pole, Bonner, and 
Gardiner are the ecclesiastics for whom political power 
was an instrument for the enforcement of religious 
conformity. Mary and Elizabeth are the royal imper- 
sonations of the two parties, both princesses of the 
Tudor blood, with the inherited courage that rises to 
emergencies ; but Mary has the foreign strain of big- 
otry, while Elizabeth, a full Englishwoman, has an in- 
stinctive understanding of and fellow-feeling with the 
real temper of her countrymen. On the whole Tennyson 
does Mary more than justice ; for he uses the license 
of a dramatist to endow her with much more energy of 
speech and action than she can really have possessed, 
and to impart a fierce glow to her gloomy fanaticism. 

Mary : 

God ! I have been too slack, too slack ; 

There are Hot Gospellers even among our guards — 

Nobles we dared not touch. We have but burnt 

The heretic priest, workmen, and women and children. 

Wet, famine, ague, fever, storm, wreck, wrath, — 



vi.] THE PLAYS 159 

We have so play'd the coward ; but by God's grace, 
We'll follow Philip's leading, and set up 
The Holy Office here — garner the wheat, 
And burn the tares with unquenchable fire. 1 

Cecil's brief reflections, after conversing with Eliza- 
beth, mark the contrast — 

" Much it is 
To be nor mad, nor bigot — have a mind — 
Not let Priests' talk, or dream of worlds to be, 
Miscolour things about her — sudden touches 
Tor him, or him — sunk rocks ; no passionate faith — 
But — if let be — balance and compromise ; 
Brave, wary, sane to the heart of her — a Tudor 
School'd by the shadow of death — a Boleyn, too, 
Glancing across the Tudor — not so well." 2 

The passage is a model of laconic expression, indicat- 
ing rapid and concentrated thought. In the general 
diction of this play the absence of ornament is remark- 
able ; the poet has put a curb on his fancy, and has 
stripped his English for the encounter of keen wits 
occupied in affairs of State ; the priests, politicians, 
and soldiers waste no words. Yet we have here and 
there familiar touches of the picturesque, as in Wyatt' s 
reference to his father — 

Wyatt : 

Courtier of many courts, he loved the more 

His own gray towers, plain life and letter'd peace, 

To read and rhyme in solitary fields, 

The lark above, the nightingale below, 

And answer them in song. 3 

Also in the rendering of that well-known story of 
Wyatt reconnoitring the breach in London Bridge, 

1 Act v. Scene v. 2 Ibid. 3 Act. n. Scene i. 



160 TENNYSON [chap. 

whereby he was cut off from the city, was forced to 
march round by Kingston, and failed in his enterprise — 
" Last night I cliinb'd into the gate-house, Brett, 
And scared the gray old porter and his wife. 
And then I crept along the gloom and saw 
They had hewn the drawbridge down into the river. 
It roll'd as black as death ; and that same tide 
Which, coming with our coming, seem'd to smile 
And sparkle like our fortune as thou saidst, 
Ran sunless down, and moaned against the piers." l 

The play of " Harold," which followed next in the 
" historical trilogy," 2 takes us back to a period when 
history is still blended with romance; so that the 
dramatist could let loose the reins of his imagination, 
and could fashion his characters at pleasure within 
the broad outlines of tradition. He has thus escaped 
from the bonds of exactitude ; he can be more poetic ; 
he can even avail himself of the privilege, which is 
legitimate when used moderately, of giving a turn of 
modern sentiment to the language of personages be- 
longing to a distant century. Yet Tennyson has 
nowhere in this play done violence to historic proba- 
bilities in his delineation of character and situation ; 
he takes the main incidents, such as the detention of 
Harold in Normandy until he had solemnly sworn to 
acknowledge and assist William's claim to the English 
crown, the death of Edward the Confessor, the battles 
of Stamford Bridge and Senlac, and composes them 
into dramatic scenes as an artist might paint pictures 
of them. The dialogue between Harold and his 
brother Wulfnoth, when both are prisoners of the 
Norman at Bayeux, and when Wulfnoth is imploring 

i Act ii. Scene iii. 

2 Mary, Harold, Becket. Memoir, vol. ii. p. 173. 



vi.] THE PLAYS 161 

Harold to obtain their liberty by swearing fealty to 
William, has striking and finely versified passages ; 
the pressure of conflicting feelings is well rendered. 
Will Harold yield and set them free for the sake of 
Edith whom he loves ? He is touched deeply. Or 
for the sake of England ? 

Harold : Deeper still. 

Wulfnoth : 

And deeper still the deep-down oubliette, 

Down thirty feet below the smiling day — 

In blackness — dogs' food thrown upon thy head. 

And over thee the suns arise and set, 

And the lark sings, the sweet stars come and go, 

And men are at their markets, in their fields, 

And woo their loves and have forgotten thee ; 

And thou art upright in thy living grave, 

Where there is barely room to shift thy side. 1 

In this passage, as generally throughout the play, the 
metrical execution is superior to that of Queen Mary. 
The whole piece, indeed, is written on a higher poetic 
level ; the language of the dialogues and speeches has 
a certain grandeur that was inadmissible in the mouths 
of the sixteenth-century notables, who were obliged to 
speak by the book ; and the portrait of a noble warrior 
and patriot king is romantically enlarged out of the 
dim records of an unlettered age. In the final Act we 
have Harold going forth to the battle, the meeting of 
the armies, and Edith with the Saxon bishop watch- 
ing the sway of a well-matched contest, until Harold 
falls : the intense excitement of the situation is pow- 
erfully suggested. The visions that pass through 
Harold's dream as he sleeps in his tent on the night 

1 Act ii. Scene ii. 



162 TENNYSON [chap. 

before Senlac, have an obvious precedent in Shake- 
speare's Richard III. ; nor is the chant of the monks 
during the fight quite an original dramatic invention, 
yet they are both skilfully adapted to enhance the 
impression of the crisis. But the concluding speech 
of William the Conqueror over the bodies of Harold 
and his mistress, Edith, is somewhat marred by the 
introduction of a moral sentiment that sounds too 
much out of character with the time — 
William : Leave them. Let them he ! 

Bury him and his paramour together. 

He that was false in oath to me, it seems 

Was false to his own wife. We will not give him 

A Christian burial. 

And possibly Tennyson did not at the moment recol- 
lect that William's mother had been just such another 
paramour as Edith. 

It will have been noticed that the Trilogy takes 
no account of chronological order. If, at any rate, 
the play of Becket, which appeared last in the series, 
being published in 1884, had preceded Queen Mary, 
we should have seen the first beginning, under 
the Plantagenets, of the quarrel between Rome and 
the English State which came to a final breach 
under the Tudors. The Memoir inserts a declaration 
of the late Mr. J. R. Green, no light authority, that 
all his researches into the annals of the twelfth 
century had not given him so vivid a conception 
of the character of Henry II. and his Court as was 
embodied in Tennyson's Becket. W T hether this is 
a superior quality in historic plays, may be open to 
argument; and at any rate one may demur respect- 
fully to the rule laid down in a letter written on this 



vi.] THE PLAYS 163 

play to its author by Mr. Bryce, that " truth in history 
is naturally truth in poetry." 1 For accuracy of repro- 
duction, though it gratifies the realistic demands of the 
present time, and gives pleasure to the cultivated reader, 
must have a tendency to cramp the imaginative free- 
dom that wings the flight of dramatic genius ; and 
some historical plays and romances of the first order 
abound with inaccuracies. Nevertheless the rule may 
be applicable to delineation of character ; and in his 
two principal personages, Henry II. and Becket, Ten- 
nyson has embroidered upon the historic canvas with 
force and fidelity. The subject lends itself to dramatic 
composition by providing for the leading personage an 
ecclesiastical hero, the Archbishop, who overtops all 
the others, marking the central line of interest through- 
out; and whose violent death in the cause that he 
impersonates supplies a fitly tragic ending to the play. 
Then, also, the story of Eosamond and Eleanor provides 
just the romantic element of secret love and feminine 
vindictiveness that is needed to soften and vary the 
harsh disputing, the interchange of threats and curses, 
between priests and barons; and to Tennyson's skill 
in seizing and working upon these points of vantage 
we may attribute largely the success of this piece 
upon the stage. The language, as in Queen Mary, is 
sonorous and masculine, the dialogues are pointed in 
thrust and parry; and one or two important speeches 
have a stately tone well suited to their occasion. 

Henry : 

Barons and bishops of our realm of England, 
After the nineteen winters of King Stephen — 
A reign which was no reign, when none could sit 
By his own hearth in peace ; when murder, common 
1 Memoir. 



164 TENNYSON [chap. 

As nature's death, like Egypt's plague, had filled 
All things with blood, when every doorway blushed, 
Dashed red with that unhallowed passover ; 
When every baron ground his blade in blood ; 
The household dough was kneaded up in blood ; 
The mill-wheel turned in blood, the wholesome plow 
Lay rusting in the furrow's yellow weeds, 
Till famine dwarf t the race — I came, your king. 1 

In the scene where Queen Eleanor has tracked Kosa- 
mond through the labyrinth to her bower, threatens 
to kill her, and offers life to her on base terms, Eosa- 
mond, after kneeling for mercy, at last turns upon the 
Queen and replies in the right tragic spirit — 

Bosamond : I am a Clifford, 

My son a Clifford and Plantagenet, 
I am to die then. . . . 

Both of us will die. 
And I will fly with my sweet boy to heaven, 
And shriek to all the saints among the stars : 
Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of England 1 
Murdered by that adulteress Eleanor, 
Whose doings are a horror to the east, 
A hissing in the west. 2 

It is a play that won not only the cordial commenda- 
tion of scholars and men of letters, but also popular 
applause, and the foremost of our English theatrical 
artists willingly joined in giving it adequate representa- 
tion; with the result that it held the stage beyond 
fifty nights, and Sir Henry Irving has said that Becket 
is one of the three successful plays produced by him 
at the Lyceum. The common remark that Tennyson 
was no born dramatist cannot be gainsaid ; he was 
essentially a lyrical poet ; and the lyric vein, being 
i Act i. Scene iii. 2 Act iv. Scene ii. 



vi.] THE PLAYS 165 

different in kind and charged with self-consciousness, 
has to be suppressed or carefully controlled in dramatic 
composition, which must be entirely objective and 
impersonal. This necessity manifestly presses with 
peculiar weight upon the writer of plays that are 
intended to be illustrations of authentic history, where 
the limits of character-probability have to be observed ; 
for the dramatist could not put fanciful ideas of his 
own into the mouth of Philip of Spain or Cranmer, 
and must curtail his lyrical exuberance. We may 
therefore admire the versatility of Tennyson's powers 
in the restraint which he placed upon his natural pro- 
pensity ; his plays are not poems in his own manner 
arranged dramatically, like Mr. Swinburne's Bothwell ; 
nor are they romances cut up into dialogue ; they are 
severe and strenuous presentations of real people and 
well-known events. This may be counted both as 
praise and dispraise; for somehow a drama that is 
closely tied to facts lacks universal interest; it cannot 
rise far above the ground, nor attain the heights that 
secure for it a permanent place in the national litera- 
ture. Yet if Tennyson has not succeeded in the 
arduous and probably hopeless enterprise of reviving 
the historical drama, he deserves credit and sympathy 
for attempting it ; and he has set an example, which 
is being followed in the romantic drama by a younger 
poet of his school in the present day, 1 of endeavouring 
to stem the downward current of deterioration in the 
taste of the play going public, by offering them plays 
of fine artistic quality and form, dealing seriously 
with momentous events and deep emotions, at a time 
when the national theatre is more and more reduced to 
iMr. Stephen Phillips. 



166 TENNYSON [chap. 

ringing changes upon the trivial and commonplace 
situations of ordinary society. 

The Promise of May takes very different ground. 
It was written somewhat unwillingly (we are told in 
the Memoir) " at the importunate entreaty of a friend 
who had urged Tennyson to try his hand on a modern 
village tragedy." This is a pastoral play, on a well- 
worn theme — the ruin of a farmer's pretty daughter, 
who has been captivated by the superior manners and 
pretentious talk of a young man belonging to the 
class of gentlefolk. When he appears on the stage 
with a book in his hand, we know from his first words 
what is coming ; we can see that Tenuyson is fetching 
another blow at the idol of materialism — 

{Enter Edgar, reading) : 

This author, with his charm of simple style 

And close dialectic, all but proving man 

An automatic series of sensations, 

Has often numbed me into apathy 

Against the unpleasant jolts of this rough road, 

That breaks off short into the abysses — made me 

A quietest, taking all things easily. 

The conviction, which throughout haunted Tennyson, 
that in default of a clear and certain prospect of 
immortality a man's soul may be lost utterly, that 
he must sink into sensuality, and cannot indeed be 
much blamed for it logically, is the moral exemplified 
in this play. It comes out in Edgar's excuse for 
seducing and deserting the girl — 

Edgar : What can a man then live for but sensations, 
Pleasant ones ? Men of old could undergo 
Unpleasant for the sake of pleasant ones 
Hereafter, like the Moslem beauties waiting 



vi.] THE PLAYS 167 

To clasp their lovers by the golden gates. 
For me, whose cheerless Houris after death 
Are Night and Silence, pleasant ones — the while, 
If possible, here, to crop the flower and pass. 
Farmer Dobson : Well, I never 'eard the likes of that afoor. 

Nor has any one else, in a London theatre. We have 
here the recurrent idea that scientific knowledge saps 
and destroys the basis of morality, and lets loose all 
the unruly affections of sinful men. Marriage is to 
Edgar an obsolete tradition — 

Edgar : When the man, 

The child of evolution, flings aside 
His swaddling bands, the morals of his tribe, 
He, following his own instincts as his God, 
Will enter on the larger golden age ; 
No pleasure there tabooed. 

This is scarcely a persuasive way of wooing a simple 
sweetheart, and Eva, the farmer's daughter, is natur- 
ally puzzled, while Dobson, Edgar's rival, is mortally 
suspicious of him ; and at the end the materialist turns 
out a double-dyed villain, who gets off much too 
cheaply. The didactic strain is evidently out of 
place in a pastoral, save for the occasionally comic 
effect of an evolutionist discoursing among bamboozled 
farmers and ploughmen — an incongruous figure, 
brought in to be battered. And the thread that 
holds together the action and the personages is too 
slight. But the rural scenery and the talk of the 
peasantry bring out Tennyson's genuine knowledge 
of country life, and this part of the dialogues is, as 
in all Tennyson's plays, alert and amusing. On its 
first night the piece was received in a contentious 
spirit by the audience at The Globe, chiefly, as the 



168 TENNYSON [chap. 

Memoir mentions, because it had been advertised as an 
attack against Socialism ; " the public had mistaken its 
purpose." Yet although an experienced playwright 
declared at the time that he could have made it a 
signal success, it is difficult to believe that a travesty 
of moral philosophy (and, to be theatrically popular, 
it must be travestied) could ever have helped to sus- 
tain Tennyson's reputation as a dramatic author. 

The other minor plays of Tennyson are of a different 
and brighter cast. In December 1879 The Falcon 
was produced at the St. James's theatre, and held the 
stage sixty-seven nights ; it is a mediaeval love story 
belonging to the class of ingenious fabliaux, told in 
the Decameron of Boccaccio, afterwards used by La 
Fontaine, and lastly arranged by Tennyson as a 
metrical drama in one scene. Fanny Kemble likened 
it to one. of A. de Musset's light pieces, though it has 
not his sparkling wit. A lady makes a sudden visit 
to the knight who has been vainly wooing her. He 
must offer her some refreshment, so he is forced to kill 
his favourite falcon to provide a solitary dish; but 
she had come to demand of him for her son this very 
bird ; and he has to confess that she has eaten 1 it. 
Such a sacrifice to love so touches the lady's heart 
that she marries him. The Cup, on the other hand, 
is in a graver vein, expanded from a story by Plutarch 
of a Galatian lady in the time of the Roman republic, 
who escapes a forced marriage by poisoning herself 
and a Galatian noble, Synorix, the traitor to his 
country, who had joined the conquering Romans and 

1 " Helas, reprit l'amant infortune, 

L'Oiseau n'estplus, vous eu avez dine." 

(La Fontaine.) 



vi.] THE PLAYS 169 

had murdered her husband. The political situation of 
a province just subdued by the Republic forms a good 
background to the action and gives it verisimilitude, 
for the story rings true as an incident that might well 
have happened in the circumstances. The characters 
are lightly yet distinctly set, with the strong emotions 
poetically expressed ; and when we learn that Irving 
with the best English actress took the leading parts, 
with magnificently decorative scenery, it is easy to 
understand why The Cup had the longest run in 
England of all Tennyson's dramatic pieces. 

Last of all, The Foresters was brought out on the 
New York stage in 1892, when it received a hearty 
welcome from the Americans, for whom this reminis- 
cence of early English woods and wolds may have come 
like a breath of fresh air to their crowded rectangular 
streets. This play has the advantage of keeping 
well outside authentic history ; for though Tennyson 
wrote of it that he had " sketched the state of the 
people in another great transition period of the mak- 
ing of England," he has luckily done nothing of the 
kind, but has given us the famous figures of popu- 
lar tradition, handed down by the minstrels and 
rhymers, in a new and lively dress. Undoubtedly 
these legends reflect the feelings and sympathies of the 
English people at a time when the great midland 
forests sheltered bands of daring men, who defied the 
Norman law and kept up a sort of guerilla against the 
foreign yoke; and this is an atmosphere much more 
favourable to a romantic woodland drama than the 
climate of history. The introduction of Titania with 
her fairies (suggested, probably for scenic effect, by 
Irving) is a somewhat temerarious device, not only for 



170 TENNYSON [chap. vi. 

the obvious reason that they have been created once 
for all by a master-hand, but also because the pure 
magical touch was not in Tennyson ; nor was his verse 
light enough for fantastic spriteliness, or his playful- 
ness sufficiently volatile. 

Titania : I, Titania, bid you flit, 

And you dare to call me Tit. 
First Fairy : Tit for love of brevity, 
Not for love of levity. 
Titania : Pertest of our flickering mob 

Wouldst thou call my Oberon Ob ? 

Moreover, Thomas Love Peacock's Maid Marian, with 
its exquisite snatches of song and ballad, and the 
richer humour of its dialogue, had already traversed 
the same ground in prose. But at the end of The 
Foresters Tennyson's special qualities of picturesque 
suggestion and reverie come out in the dreamy 
melodious lines that drop the curtain on a vision of 
primitive romance. 

Marian : And yet I think these oaks at dawn and even 
Will whisper evermore of Robin Hood ; 
We leave but happy memories in the forest. 

You, good friar, 
You Much, you Scarlet, you dear Little John, 
Your names will cling like ivy to the wood. 
And here, perhaps, a hundred years away, 
Some hunter in day dreams or half asleep 
Will hear our arrows whizzing overhead, 
And catch the winding of a phantom horn. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE LAST YEARS AND LATEST POETRY : CONCLUSION 

In 1883 a peerage was offered by the Queen to 
Tennyson, who after some hesitation consented, under 
Gladstone's advice, to accept it. He took his seat, the 
first representative in the House of Lords of a purely 
literary qualification, in 1884; and in the same year 
he voted for the Franchise Bill, having stipulated with 
Gladstone and obtained a pledge that a Bill for the 
redistribution of constituencies should follow. The 
measure he held to be just and necessary, though 
Gladstone received from him a verse of warning 
against setting the troubled waters of politics toward 
a precipitate channel. Their views upon public affairs 
soon afterward fell more and more asunder ; and wo 
find Tennyson writing that he loved Gladstone, but 
hated his Irish policy ; while the poet's natural dis- 
trust of " rash innovators " shows itself repeatedly in 
all his discourse upon the constitutional questions of 
this time. 

The years of his declining life were passed between 
his two country houses, with excursions into the 
country, visits to London, and occasional cruises in a 
friend's yacht. He received old friends and privi- 
leged guests with kindly hospitality ; talked on poli- 
tics, religion, and poetry ; spoke of men whom he had 

171 



172 TENNYSON [chap. 

known, scenes that he remembered, and books that he 
had read ; received letters out of all lands, and replied 
to some of them with epigrammatic brevity. He was 
still occupied with the leisurely composition of his 
later poems. 

From 1885 Tennyson had published, at intervals, 
three small volumes of poems, beside Locksley Hall 
Sixty Years After. One line in this poem its author 
held to be the best of the kind that he had ever 
written — 

" Universal Ocean softly washing all her warless isles," 

though it is full of the sibilants that vex all English 
verse-makers ; arid the suggestion that the sea would 
become calm when the land should be at peace may be 
thought logically perplexing. It was but seasonable 
that Tennyson's latest poetry should have been tinged 
with autumnal hues. The range of his mind had been 
widened by constant assimilation with the expansion 
of scientific knowledge, and by long experience of the 
world ; but as far horizons often produce a vague 
sadness, so his retrospective views of life, as he turns 
back and surveys it, are melancholy. In poetry and 
in prose the sequel to a fine original piece, written 
after a long interval, has very rarely, if ever, been 
successful ; though the second part is often valuable to 
the biographer by illustrating the alterations of style 
and thought that follow naturally the course of years. 
Tennyson himself said that "the two Locksley Halls 
were likely to be in the future two of the most 
historically interesting of his poems, as descriptive of 
the tone of ' the age at two distant periods of his life." 
But it may be questioned whether the interest is not 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND LATEST POETRY 173 

rather biographical than historical, whether, in fact, 
the change of tone was not in the age, bnt in Tenny- 
son himself. For there can be no doubt that the 
interval of sixty years, over which the aged squire 
in the second poem looks back so mournfully, was for 
the English people a period of active and eager enter- 
prise, of social betterment and national prosperity. 
The grave forebodings of the poem, the sense of dis- 
may at the ills of mortality, reflect the mood of the 
poet, not of the people. He would probably have 
replied that the poem was a dramatic representation 
of old age, and he disclaimed any identity with the 
portraits of his imagination ; but it is impossible for 
an author to insist positively on his entire personal 
detachment from his poetic impersonations of thought 
and character. The choice of subject and its treat- 
ment mark unmistakably the dominant ideas ; nor 
can an essentially lyrical poet give fervid expression 
to any feelings but his own. 

On the whole, it must be admitted that the two last 
volumes fall below the level of his verse at its prime ; 
nor could one expect or desire that after threescore 
years and ten a poet's age should not affect the force 
and fertility of his writing and his general outlook on 
life. Some of these late poems are overweighted with 
thought, the diction is too emphatic, the colour of his 
meditations takes a more sombre tinge than hereto- 
fore, and a certain cloudiness gathers over his loftier 
utterances. Yet in Demeter and Persephone we have 
still the delicate handling, the self-restraint, the severe 
air of his earlier compositions. The ancient allegory 
of the Earth goddess, the figure of Nature in flower 
and in decay, of the disappearance and return of the 



174 TENNYSON [chap. 

harvest, is finely enlarged into the moral conception of 
light eventually conquering darkness, of Heaven finally 
prevailing over the sunless halls of Hades. The lines 
subjoined are full of his old picturesque charm — 

" Once more the reaper in the gleam of dawn 
Will see me by the landmark far away 
Blessing his field, or seated in the dusk 
Of even, by the lonely threshing-floor, 
Rejoicing in the Harvest and the grange." 

And one well-known passage seems to connect, by a 
simile, Demeter's vision of her daughter with telepathic 
intimations — one of those obscure psychical phenom- 
ena which have recently come within the scope of scien- 
tific research — 

" Last, as the likeness of a dying man, 
Without his knowledge, flits from him to warn 
A far-off friendship that he conies no more." 

The passing of such shadows over the brain is well 
known to be an old and perplexing experience; and 
Crabbe, who collected the legends of the seashore, 
alludes to such a visitation in one of his Tales. 

Of Tiresias some mention has already been made. 
Possibly the miscellaneous character of these pieces 
may be thought to do some damage to their collective 
impressiveness, by suggesting that stray leaves may 
have been collected and appended to the principal 
poem in each volume. " Owd Koa," a story of a dog, 
told in Lincolnshire dialect that cannot be understood 
without a glossary, becomes wearisome in more than 
sixty stanzas ; the more so because, being placed in the 
latest complete edition between Demeter and Vastness, 



vii. J LAST YEARS AND LATEST POETRY 175 

it finds the reader unprepared for such abrupt alterna- 
tions of style and subject. No one, as has been said, 
would count it unnatural or unbecoming that in many 
of these poems the shade which perpetually hung over 
Tennyson's brooding mind should have become darker 
in the late evening of his days. His sympathy with 
human unhappiness repeatedly shows itself in such 
pieces as Forlorn, The Leper's Bride, Komney's Ke- 
morse, The King, The Bandit's Death, — all of which 
exhibit the sorrowful sides of life, and illustrate 
patience in suffering, repentance, or, in one instance, 
revenge. In the poem of Forlorn, where a mother 
adjures her daughter not to marry without confess- 
ing to her lover a long-past frailty, the tone is too 
vehement; and the same subject has been more 
emotionally handled in one of George Meredith's 
earliest poems, Margaret's Bridal Eve; where the 
mother disregards moral scruples, and takes the more 
natural part of urging the girl to conceal her fault ; 
bat she confesses, is renounced by the lover, and dies. 
Of the two versions one must prefer that of Meredith, 
who strikes a superior keynote, and creates the right 
tragic situation by throwing the strain of conscience and 
the merit of self-sacrifice entirely upon the daughter. 
The same gloominess of atmosphere overhangs The 
Death of (Enone. The beautiful mountain-nymph of 
Tennyson's youth, passionately lamenting her deser- 
tion upon Mount Ida, has now become soured and 
vindictive; she is a resentful wife to whom Paris, 
dying from the poisoned arrow, crawls " lame, crooked, 
reeling, livid, through the mist," imploring her to heal 
him. (Enone spurns him as an adulterer who may 
" go back to his adulteress and die " ; yet at his death 



176 TENNYSON [chap. 

she throws herself into the flames of his pyre. Tenny- 
son said that he considered this poem even more 
strictly classical in form and language than the old 
CEnone. To some of us, nevertheless, it may seem 
that its tone of stern reprobation jars with the style 
and feeling of antique Hellenic tradition. The story 
is taken from a short passage in a late Greek writer ; x 
and we may remember that in Homer the adulteress 
Helen is found living happily and honourably after 
the war with her husband in Sparta. And Tenny- 
son's propensity to enforce grave moral lessons has 
led him to lay the lash so heavily on Paris as to dis- 
parage CEnone and provoke compassion for the sinner. 
The spirituality of the East, whence all great reli- 
gions of the world have originated, had a strong attrac- 
tion for his meditative temperament; but he never 
threw its deeper philosophy into concrete form, though 
he sketched the beginning of a poem upon Ormuzd 
and Ahriman, the Manichsean spirits of good and evil. 
Akbar's Dream, the single study made by Tennyson 
of an authentic Asiatic figure, does indeed embody 
the lofty ideal of an eclectic Faith transcending for- 
malism, sectarian intolerance, and the idols of the 
crowd, and seeking for some spacious theology that 
shall comprehend the inner significance and aspirations 
of all external worships. Akbar, however, was not, 
could not be, a great spiritual leader of men ; he was 
a large-minded politic emperor ruling over manifold 
races and conflicting creeds ; and he himself foresaw 
that his eclectic system could not take root or endure. 
This general conception of his character and position 
is drawn in grand outline, though the subject is too 
1 Apolloclorus. 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND LATEST POETRY 177 

large for so short a poem ; and the concluding Hymn 
to the Sun is a majestic song of praise — 

"Adoring Him the Timeless in the flame that measures Time." 

The last poem that Tennyson finished was The 
Dreamer, who hears in his sleep the wail of the Earth 
rolling through space, the mournful music of a sphere 
oppressed by the burden of the sins and misfortunes 
of the race whom it is bearing along, helpless and un- 
willing, to an uncertain destiny. The poet endeavours 
to cheer our disconsolate planet by the assurance that 

" All's well that ends well, 

Whirl and follow the Sun," 

which may be understood allegorically as of hope in 
the Light that leads. 

The Death of CEnone and Akbar's Dream, with 
other minor pieces, are in the volume which closed, 
in 1892, the long series of poems that had held two 
generations under their charm. Throughout that 
period, almost equal in length to Queen Victoria's 
reign, Tennyson maintained his foremost place among 
the Victorian poets ; and although one can mark the 
slow decline of a genius that had reached its zenith 
fifty years before death extinguished it, yet hardly 
any English poet has so long retained power, or has 
published so little that might have been omitted with 
benefit to his permanent reputation. Nor will it ever 
be forgotten that in his eighty -first year he wrote 
Crossing the Bar, where the noiseless indraw of the 
ebb-tide from the land back into the ocean is a mag- 
nificent image of the soul's quiet parting from life on 
earth and its absorption into the vastness of infinity. 



178 TENNYSON [chap. 

It is apparent from the Memoir, at any rate, that 
the weight of more than fourscore years depressed 
none of Tennyson's interest in literature and art, in 
political and philosophic questions ; nor did it slacken 
his enjoyment of humorous observation or anecdote. 
Among many recollections he told of Hallam (the 
historian) saying to him, " I have lived to read Car- 
lyle's French Revolution, but I cannot get on with it, 
the style is so abominable " ; and of Carlyle groaning 
over Hallam's Constitutional History, " Eh, it's a mis- 
erable skeleton of a book " — which brings out into 
summary comparison two opposite schools of history- 
writing, the picturesque and the precise. He praised 
Carlyle's honesty, but said that he knew nothing 
about poetry or art. He told how the sage of Chelsea 
once came to smoke a pipe with him one evening in 
London, when the talk turned upon the immortality 
of the soul, and Carlyle said, " Eh, old Jewish rags, 
you must clear your mind of all that," and likened 
man's sojourn on earth to a traveller's rest at an inn; 
whereupon Tennyson rejoined that the traveller knew 
whither he was bound, and where he should sleep on 
the night following. FitzGerald, who was present, 
might have quoted to them his own stanza from Omar 
Khayyam, which gives the true inner meaning of the 
famous parable of the dervish who insisted on taking 
up his quarters in the king's palace, which he declared 
to be nothing more than a caravanserai. 1 

Robert Browning's death in December 1889 dis- 



1 " 'Tis but a tent where takes his one day's rest 
A Sultan to the realm of Death addrest ; 
The Sultan rises, and the dark Ferrash 
Strikes, and prepares it for another guest." 



vii.] LAST YEARS AND LATEST POETRY 179 

tressed him acutely ; it was a forewarning to the elder 
of two brothers in verse for whom posterity must 
decide whether they are to be equals in renown. " A 
great thinker in verse," Tennyson said of him ; and 
again, " He has plenty of music in him, but cannot 
get it out ; he has intellect enough for a dozen of us, 
but he has not got the glory of words." Their dis- 
tinctive styles and qualities are so well marked that 
each poet sets the other in relief ; and the generation 
that had two such interpreters is singularly fortunate. 
In the junior poets of his later day he took a sympathetic 
interest. He wrote kindly to Rudyard Kipling, whose 
patriotic verse pleased him, and to William Watson, 
who twelve months later paid a grateful tribute to his 
memory in one of the best among many threnodies. 

His last residence at Farringford was in the spring 
and early summer of 1892, when he made a yachting 
voyage to the Channel Islands; and by the autumn 
he was at Aldworth in Surrey. Lord Selborne and the 
Master of Balliol visited him, but he told Jowett that 
he was not strong enough for the usual discussions 
between them on religion and philosophy. Jowett 
answered, " Your poetry has an element of philosophy 
more to be considered than any regular philosophy in 
England," which might be interpreted as an ambiguous 
and possibly not an extravagant compliment. 

The final chapter of the Memoir gives briefly some 
of his latest sayings, and describes a peaceful and 
noble ending. He found his Christianity undisturbed 
by contentious sects and creeds, but, he said, " I dread 
the losing of forms ; I have expressed this in my 
Akbar." When, at the end of September 1892, he 
fell seriously ill, and Sir Andrew Clarke arrived, the 



180 TENNYSON [chap. 

physician and his patient fell to discussing G-ray's 
Elegy ; and a few days later, although he had become 
much worse, he sent for his Shakespeare, but he was 
obliged to let his son read to him. Next day he said, 
" I want the blinds up ; I want to see the sky and the 
light." It was a glorious morning, and the warm 
sunshine was flooding the Sussex weald and the line 
of the South Downs, which he could see from his 
window. He lay with his hand resting on his Shake- 
speare, unable to read ; and after midnight on the 6th 
October he passed away very quietly. The funeral 
service in Westminster Abbey, with its two anthems 
— Crossing the Bar and The Silent Voices — fill- 
ing the long-drawn aisles and rising to the fretted vault 
above the heads of a great congregation, will long be 
remembered by those who were present. His pleasant 
and prosperous life had been varied by few griefs or 
troubles ; he had attained signal success in the high 
calling that he had set before himself ; he had won 
honour and fame among all English-speaking peoples, 
and he departed at the coming of the time when no 
man can work. 

A comparison of Tennyson with Browning has 
already been touched upon. Browning's obscurity, 
when he was engaged upon his minute mental anat- 
omy, his manner of leaving his thoughts rough- 
hewn, are points of contrast with Tennyson's clear 
and chiselled phrasing; we have less light as we go 
deeper. The truth is that Browning's psychologic 
studies are too diffuse and discursive for the compact 
and vivid treatment that is essential to poetry. And 
the peculiarity of his genius — the strain and hard 



vii.] CONCLUSION 181 

service that lie imposed upon the English tongue — 
place him to some extent outside the right apostolic 
succession, in its direct line, of our national poets, of 
those who have enlarged the capacity of our language 
for imaginative and musical expression, without sub- 
jecting the instrument to rough usage. Among these 
Tennyson may certainly be counted. To lay stress 
upon the metrical variety of his poems, upon his ex- 
periments in classical prosody, or upon his development 
of the resources of the language for harmony, would 
be to repeat what has been frequently said by others. 
It may be questioned whether he could give his 
rhythm the swift movement, as of a thoroughbred racer 
on turf, that is produced by Mr. Swinburne in some of 
his most elaborate compositions, where the accent and 
the quantity fall together; nor had he the resonant 
organ-notes of Milton when he was playing a sym- 
phony upon the open vowels. Yet his power of 
smoothing down linguistic harshness and difficulties 
was remarkable ; and his skill in the arrangement of 
words to connote physical sensations has been already 
mentioned. His command over the long, flowing line, 
which no poet before him had used so frequently, 
gave it the flexibility that served him well in such 
pieces as The Northern Farmer, where the broad 
dialect required free play; while in other poems he 
could give this metre the sounding roll of a chant 
or a chorus. On the instrumental resources of blank 
verse we know that he set the highest value. " Blank 
verse," he said once, "can be the finest mode of 
expression in our language " ; he had his own secrets 
of arranging and diversifying it ; and all the latest 
composers in this essentially English metre have 



182 TENNYSON [chap. 

profited by his lessons. But for a thorough analysis 
of Tennyson's management of blank verse, in com- 
parison with the other masters of the art, the student 
must again be referred to Mr. J. B. Mayor's " Chap- 
ters on English Metre," where the styles of Tennyson 
and Browning, as representatives of modern English 
versification, are critically examined. 

It will have been seen that^some attempt has been 
made in these pages to combine a short biography of 
Tennyson with a running commentary on his poems, 
as they illustrate his intellectual habit and the circum- 
stances of his life,, And to some extent the result 
accords with Taine's generalising treatment of litera- 
ture as a bundle of documents that reveal and record 
the conditions, social and climatic, moral and material, 
in which it was produced, and thus elucidate history. 
Yet in the case of a writer who is almost our con- 
temporary, this analytical method is too easy to be 
of much importance, for there is an obvious and 
necessary correspondence between his work and his 
world ; the man and his milieu are both well known 
to us ; the characteristics are those of his class and 
his nation ; we have only to put together causes and 
effects that show manifestly the correlation between 
the environment and its product. Among the signs 
of his time may be noticed, in particular, the influence 
on his poetry of the scientific spirit, the growth of 
accurate habits of observation, the demand for exacti- 
tude in details, for minute delineation of accessories, 
for a patient study of small things ; the spirit, in fact, 
which has affected art and literature in the form of 
what is now called realism. No poet has been more 
solicitous than Tennyson about precision in his land- 



vii.] CONCLUSION 183 

scape painting, or more carefully correct in his allusions 
to animals and plants ; and in most instances the pre- 
cision of fact strengthens the ornamental form, like a 
solid building architecturally decorated. Burke, in his 
treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, observes that 
"there are reasons in nature why the obscure idea, 
when properly conveyed, should be more affecting in 
poetry than the clear"; but in Tennyson's verse the 
exactitude has in no way detracted from its beauty. 
And his metaphors are much more than figures of style ; 
they very often do really intensify a vivid sensation. 
Yet the scientific impulse carries him too far when 
experimental physics are made to furnish a metaphor 
for unbearable emotion — 

"Break, thou deep vase of chilling tears, 
That grief has shaken into frost." 

We have to understand that at a certain low tempera- 
ture water, if shaken, will expand into ice and break 
the vessel that contains it ; and so a heart that is 
benumbed with grief will be rent if it is agitated by a 
too painful recollection. We may admire the technical 
skill that has compressed all this into two short lines ; 
but the metaphor is too ingenious, and the effort of 
seizing the analogy undoubtedly checks our sensibility 
to the poet's distress. He is much more in his true 
poetical element when he returns to the contempla- 
tion of the mystery that no scientific research can 
penetrate or unravel, when he plucks the flower in the 
crannied wall — 

" If I could understand 
What you are, root and all, 
I should know what God and man is." 



184 TENNYSON [chap. 

" Toute Pimniensite traverse l'humble fleur du pen- 
seur conteniplee," says Victor Hugo; the microscope 
and telescope, the vast prospects and retrospects thrown 
open to us by Science, still leave the world no less an 
unintelligible enigma than before. Between mythology 
and science, between the capricious elemental divinities 
and the conception of fixed mechanical laws, we travel 
from the earliest to the latest stages of man's perpetual 
endeavour to decipher the secrets of nature. The myths 
have always lent themselves to poetry, which indeed 
may be said to have created them ; and Tennyson has 
given new form and moral significance to some of the 
ancient fables. But his imaginative faculty was also 
applied to the metaphysical problems which lie beyond 
the range of discovery ; and he has treated the laws of 
nature as the index and intimations of the infinite 
Power that moves somewhere behind them. Whatever 
may be said of him as a philosopher, it may be granted 
that in this region of ideas he has produced some 
splendid poetry, and has illustrated the questioning 
spirit of his age. In the latest poems his dismay at 
the pettiness of man's part and place in the cosmic 
evolution, at the vision of a godless ocean sapping 
and swallowing up all definite beliefs, seems to have 
gradually quieted down into the conviction that a 
higher and purified existence surely awaits us. Such 
short pieces as Doubt and Prayer, Faith, The Silent 
Voices, and others in the small volume of 1892, are 
passing Thoughts versified, like the Gnomic sentences 
in prose of Pascal or Joubert. Their tone is generally 
hopeful and devout ; and the Silent Voices of the dead 
call him 



vii.] CONCLUSION 185 

" Forward to the starry track, 
Glimmering up the height beyond me, 
On, and always on." 

In Wordsworth's famous Ode the celestial light is 
behind us, and slowly fades into the light of common 
day — 

" Whither has fled the visionary gleam ?" 

We look back at "the immortal sea which brought us 
hither." In Tennyson's poem of Merlin and the Gleam 
the light is in front of us across the great water — 

"There on the border 
Of boundless Ocean, 
And all but in Heaven 
Hovers the Gleam." 

If, again, we descend from these spheres of lofty 
speculation, and turn to the positive and practical 
aspects of Tennyson's poetry, we may allow that it 
undoubtedly represents the ideas and tastes, the 
inherited predilections, the prevailing currents of 
thought, of Englishmen belonging to his class and his 
generation. Moderation in politics, refined culture, 
religious liberalism chequered by doubt, a lively 
interest in the advance of scientific discovery coupled 
with alarm lest it might lead us astray, attachment to 
ancient institutions, larger views of the duty of the 
State towards its people, and increasing sympathy 
with poverty and distress — all these feelings and 
tendencies find their expression in Tennyson's poems, 
and will be recognised as the salient features of the 
national character. In the direction of political ideals 
his imaginative faculty enabled him sometimes not 



186 TENNYSON [chap. 

only to discern the movement, but also to lead the 
way. The imperial conception — realising the British 
empire's unity in multiplicity, regarding it as a deep- 
rooted tree which sustains and nourishes its flourishing 
branches, while the branches in return give support 
and vitality to the stem — was proclaimed in his verse 
before it had attained its present conspicuous popu- 
larity. He saw that the edifice had been quietly set 
up by builders who made no noise over their work; 
and he called upon all English-speaking folk to join 
hands and consolidate it. The revival and spread of 
profound veneration for the Throne, as the common 
centre and head of a scattered dominion, is another 
outcome of the same idea that owes its development 
to the last thirty years of Queen Victoria's reign ; and 
some share in promoting it may fairly be attributed to 
the Laureate's stately verse. In all these respects, 
therefore, it will be right for the future historian to 
treat Tennyson as a representative of the Victorian 
period, and to draw inferences from his work as to the 
general intellectual and political tendencies of the 
nineteenth century. Yet a single writer can at most 
only present particular aspects of a general view, 
coloured and magnified in poetry for the purposes of 
his art, and refracted through the medium of his own 
individuality, which is always strong in men of great 
genius, who are apt to survey their world from 
different standpoints, and often to take opposite sides, 
as in the instance of Byron and Scott. It could there- 
fore be of little advantage to enlarge further upon this 
theory in a biography. 

In the domain of pure literature it is less difficult 
to measure Tennyson's influence, and to define his 



vii.] CONCLUSION 187 

position, so far as one may venture upon doing so within 
a few years of Lis death. One can perceive, looking 
backward, that his genius flowered in due season; 
there had been a plentiful harvest of verse in the 
preceding generation, but it had been garnered, and 
the ground was clear. About this time English 
poetry had relapsed into one of those intervals of 
depression that precede a fresh rise ; the popular taste 
was artificial and decadent, running down to the 
pseudo-romantic and conventional forms, to a false 
note of sentiment and to affectation in style. The hour 
had come for the man who could take up the bequest 
of that brilliant and illustrious group who, in the first 
quarter of the century, raised English poetry to a 
height far above the classic elegance of the eighteenth 
century, and beyond the domestic, nature-loving, verse 
of Cowper and Crabbe. A new impulse was needed 
to lift it, and to break in upon the dulness that seems 
just then to have settled down, like a passing cloud, 
upon every form of art. This flat and open space 
gave Tennyson a fair start upon the course, and 
favoured the recognition of his superiority ; although 
his general popularity must have spread gradually, 
since we have seen that even in 1850, when the choice 
of a new Laureate had to be made, his claim was not 
admitted without deliberation in high political quar- 
ters. Yet all genuine judges had already found in 
Tennyson the poet who could revive again the imag- 
inative power of verse, who possessed the spell that 
endows with beauty and artistic precision the incidents 
and impressions which a weaker hand can only repro- 
duce in vague outline, or tamely ; while the master is 
both luminous and accurate. His first welcome was 



188 TENNYSON [chap. 

in the acclamation of his contemporaries ; and herein 
lay the promise of his poetry, for to the departing 
generation the coming man has little to say. During 
Tennyson's youth the whole complexion and " moving 
circumstance" of the age had undergone a great 
alteration. It was the uproar and martial clang, 
the drums and trampling of the long war against 
France, the mortal strife between revolutionary and 
reactionary forces, that kindled the fiery indignation 
of Shelley and Byron, and affected Coleridge and 
even Wordsworth, " in their hot youth, when George 
the Third was king." Tennyson's opportunity arrived 
when these thunderous echoes had died away, when 
the Keform Bill had become law, and when the era 
of peace in Europe and comfortable prosperity in 
England, that marks the middle of the nineteenth 
century, had just set in. This change in the temper 
of the times is reflected in his poetry ; the wild and 
stormy element has disappeared ; his impressions of 
the earth, sea, and sky are mainly peaceful, melan- 
choly, mysterious ; he is looking on the happy autumn 
fields, or listening in fancy to the ripple of the brook, 
or the plash of a quiet sea. 

Length of life, maturity of experience, abundant 
leisure, and domestic happiness must also be reckoned 
among the tranquillising influences that have imparted 
the charms of equanimity, self-restraint, and exquisite 
finish to the best of Tennyson's poetry. 

In 1890 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was Tenny- 
son's junior by only twenty-three days, wrote to him : — 

"I am proud of my birth year, and humbled when I 
think of who were and who are my coevals. Darwin, the 
destroyer and creator ; Lord Houghton, the pleasant and 



vii.] CONCLUSION 189 

kind-hearted lover of men of letters ; Gladstone, whom I 
leave it to you to characterise, but whose vast range of 
intellectual powers few will question; Mendelssohn, whose 
music still rings in our ears; and the Laureate, whose 
'jewels five words long' — many of them a good deal 
longer — sparkle in our memories." 1 

This is a brilliant constellation of talents to have shot 
np out of a single year (1809) ; and the lives of all 
these men, except Mendelssohn, were long ; they had 
full scope for their various capacities. But among 
Tennyson's precursors in the poetic arena three leaders 
had died young in the foremost ranks, Byron, Shelley, 
and Keats : two of them in the midst of feverish activ- 
ity, they were all cut off suddenly and prematurely. The 
sum-total of their years added together exceeds by no 
more than eleven the number that were allotted to 
Tennyson's account. And if the productive period of 
a poet's life may be taken to begin at twenty-one 
(which is full early), it sums up to about thirty-one 
years for all these three poets, and to above sixty 
years for Tennyson alone. By the time that Coleridge 
was twenty-six he had produced (we are told 2 ) all the 
poetry by which he will be remembered, and critics 
have declared that Wordsworth did all his good work 
in the decade between 1798 and 1808. It was Tenny- 
son's good fortune not only to reach a greater age 
than any other poet of his century, but also to sustain 
the excellence of his verse for a longer period. 
Wordsworth, indeed, lived and wrote up to old age ; 
and in him, as in Tennyson, we have the contemplative 
humour, the balance of mind swaying occasionally 

1 Memoir. 

2 Coleridge, by H. D. Traill (" Men of Letters " series). 



190 TENNYSON [chap. 

between cheerfulness and dejection, that is natural 
to men who are passing quietly through all the 
stages of life. Nor should we forget that each of them 
was most fortunate in the affection of his family and 
in a well-ordered home ; while Byron and Shelley 
were incessantly at war with society, and Coleridge's 
matrimonial venture brought him nothing but vexa- 
tion and embarrassment. 

Tennyson's face and demeanour, which have been 
preserved in the fine portraits of him by Watts and 
Millais, were so remarkable, that at the first sight one 
took the impression of unusual dignity and intellectual 
distinction. His voice, gesture, and bearing imperson- 
ated, so to speak, his character and reputation; his 
appearance fulfilled the common expectation (so often 
disappointed) of perceiving at once something singular 
and striking in the presence of a celebrity. Jowett 
wrote of him after his death that he was a magnificent 
man who stood before you in his native refinement 
and strength, and that the unconventionality of his 
manners was in keeping with the originality of his 
figure. He enjoyed his well-earned fame and the 
tokens of enthusiastic admiration that came to him 
from near and far; he listened to applause with 
straightforward complacency. From the sensitiveness 
to which the race of poets is proverbially liable he was 
not free ; and there are passages in his poetry which 
indicate a shrinking anticipation of the inquest that is 
now held over a notable man immediately after his 
death, to scrutinise his private life, and to satiate 
public curiosity. Under the title of The Dead Prophet 
he published (1885) verses that express this feeling by 
the rather ghastly image of a great teacher of the 



vii.] CONCLUSION 191 

people " whose word had won him a noble name," left 
stripped and naked after his death before a staring 
crowd, his corpse laid bare by his friends, and insulted 
by those whom the Prophet had offended. This poem 
was written, as the Memoir tells us, because Tennyson 
felt strongly that the world likes to know about the 
"roughness, eccentricities, and defects of a man of 
genius, rather than what he really is." It is a very 
natural popular craving to desire minute knowledge of 
everything that completes a full-length portrait and 
re-creates the living bodily presence of a famous man 
who has passed away; nor would any man of his 
eminence in our time be more likely to gain than to 
lose by such a scrutiny than Tennyson. But in the 
Recollections contributed to the Memoir by some dis- 
tinguished men who were qualified to speak of him 
by long friendship and close personal intercourse, we 
have ample descriptions of his private life, his way of 
thought, his conversation, and the various sides of his 
character. We know already what he really was ; we 
are aware of his susceptibilities ; and by respecting 
them with the deference which they would command 
if Tennyson were still alive, we shall best honour the 
memory of an illustrious Englishman and a true and 
noble poet. 



INDEX 



Ahriman, 176. 

"Akbar's Dream," 143, 176-177, 

179. 
Albert, Prince Consort, 76. 
Aldworth, 129, 150, 179-180. 
Allen, Dr., 52. 
America, 169. 
Amesbury, 107. 
" Anacaona," 10. 
" Ancient Sage, The," 143-114. 
" Apostles " at Cambridge, 7-8, 

17. 
Argyll, Duke of, 95-96-, 128. 
Armageddon, battle of, 8. 
Arnold, Matthew, 31-32. 
Arthur, 97-98, 100, 102, 103, 104- 

107, 110-112. 
Arthurian Legends, 45-46, 95, 96- 

97, 100-102/ 
Athenseum, 10. 
" Audley Court," 47. 
" Auld Robin Gray," 118. 
Austen, Jane, 151. 
Auvergne, 125, 126-127. 
" Avilion," 112. 
" Aylmer's Field," 116-117. 

B 

Bacon, 7. 

Bagenhall (Queen Mary), 158. 
Balfour, Mr. Arthur, 14 note. 
"Bandit's Death, The," 175. 
" Banks and braes o' bonnie 

Doon," 60-61. 
Barnes, William, 121 note. 
Beaconsfield, Lord, 149-150. 



Becket, 162-164. 

Belgium, 54. 

Beljame, Professor A., 116. 

Bentham, Jeremy, 55. 

Biographia Llteraria (Cole- 
ridge), 119. 

Blackdown, 129. 

Blackwood' 's Magazine, 15. 

Blakesley, 39. 

Blank verse, Tennyson's, 181-182. 

Boccaccio, 168. 

Bolton Abbey, 33. 

Bonn, 28. 

Bonner, Bishop (Queen Mary), 
158. 

Bowring, John, 15. 

Boyle, Mary, 6-7. 

Bradley, Professor A. C, 72 note. 

Browning, Robert, 13, 94, 178, 179, 
180-181, 182. 

Brownings, The, 75, 85. 

Bryce, Mr., 163. 

Bunyan, 64. 

" Burial of Sir John Moore," 79. 

Burke, 28, 183. 

Burns, 33, 60-61, 120-121. 

Byron, 6, 27, 29, 30, 31, 34, 126, 
154, 186, 188, 189, 190. 



Calvinism, 136. 

Cambridge, 4-12, 13, 17, 149. 

" Camelot," 102. 

Cameron, Mrs., 151. 

Campbell, 79. 

Carlyle, 39-40, 53, 62-63, 152, 17* 

Catullus, 61-62. 



193 



194 



TENNYSON 



Caxton, 97, 101. 
Cenci (Shelley), 154. 
Chanson de Roland, 112. 
Chapters on English Metre, by 

J. B. Mayor, 23 note, 182. 
"Charge of the Light Brigade," 

79. 
Charlemagne, 98. 
Charles, Mrs. Rundle, 62. 
Chartists, 33. 
Chancer, 61. 
Cheltenham, 52, 60. 
" Children's Hospital," 133. 
" Christopher North," 15. 
Clark, Sir Andrew, 179-180. 
Clevedon, 75. 
Clough, Arthur, 125. 
Coleridge, Hartley, 32. 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 13, 14- 

15, 29, 32, 34, 119, 123-124, 142, 

154, 188, 189, 190. 
Cologne, 28. 
" Come into the garden, Maud," 

90. 
"Confessions of a Sensitive 

Mind," 16. 
Cornwall, 54, 60, 125. 
Couchers du Soleil (Victor 

Hugo's), 125. 
Coventry, 33. 
Cowper, 31, 79, 187. 
Crabbe, 113, 115, 120, 174, 187. 
Cranmer (Queen Mary), 157, 165. 
Crimean War, 29, 79. 
Cromwell, 62. 

" Crossing the Bar," 177, 180. 
Cup, The, 168-169. 



"Daisy, The," 75. 

Dante, 41, 109. 

Darwin, Charles, 128, 188. 

"Day Dream, The," 38. 

" Dead Prophet, The," 190-191. 

" Death of CEnone," 175-176, 177. 

"Defence of Lucknow," 79-80. 



" Demeter and Persephone," 173- 

174. 
Derbyshire, 126. 

" Despair," 133, 135-136, 137, 146. 
Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) , 149- 

150. 
Dixon, Canon, 76. 
"Dobson" (Promise of May), 

167. 
" Dora," 46-47, 116. 
"Doubt and Pride," 184. 
" Dream of Fair Women," 36- 

37. 
Dryden, 27. 
Dufferin and Ava, Marquis of, 

152. 

E 

East Anglia, 113. 

Ecclesiastes, 92. 

" Edgar " (Promise of May), 166- 

167. 
Edith (Harold), 161, 162. 
Edward the Confessor (Harold), 

160. 
Edwin Morris, 47. 
"Elaine," 104. 
Eleanor, Queen (Becket), 163, 

164. 
Elizabeth, Queen, 98, 156, 158, 

159. 
Emma, Queen of the Sandwich 

Islands, 128. 
" Enoch Arden," 113-116. 
"Euphranor" (E. FitzGe raid's) , 

60-61. 
Eva (Promise of May) , 167. 
Evolution, 128, 140, 144. 
" ExcaliburTnil-112. 
Eyre, Governor, 128-129. 



Fairy Queen, 97, 102. 
"Faith," 184. 
Falcon, The, 168. 



INDEX 



195 



Farringford, 83, 95, 125, 127, 150, 
151, 179. 

" First Quarrel, The," 133. 

FitzGerald, E., 33, 3(3, 38, 39, 47, 
52, 54, 60-61, 62, 63, 72, 73, 121- 
122, 147, 152-153, 178. 

Foresters, The, 169-170. 

" Forlorn," 175. 

Foundations of Belief (A. J. Bal- 
four's), 14 note. 

France, 28, 34, 94, 126-127, 128, 
154, 188. 

Franchise Bill, 171. 

French Historic Drama, 154-155. 

Fryston, 75. 

G 

" Gardener's Daughter, The," 46. 

Gardiner, Bishop (Queen Mary), 
157, 158. 

" Gareth and Lynette," 153. 

Garibaldi, 127-128. 

George Eliot, 150. 

Gil Bias, 115. 

Gladstone, W. E., 9, 91, 92, 149, 
150, 171, 189. 

Glastonbury, 75, 112. 

Gleanings of Past Years (Glad- 
stone's), 91, 92. 

Globe Theatre, 167-168. 

" Godiva," 33. 

Goethe, 40, 128. 

Goldsmith, 154. 

Gordon, General, 150. 

" Grandmother," 63, 118, 120. 

Gray's Elegy, 180. 

Green, J. R., 162. 

"Guinevere," 96, 103, 104-107, 
112, 150. 



Hales, Professor, 3-4. 

Hallam, Arthur, 9, 15, 17, 29-30, 

63, 75. 
Hallam, Henry, 39, 52, 178. 
Hamlet, 51, 74, 90. 



Hare, Julius, 39. 

Harold, 160-162. 

Henry II. (Becket) , 162, 163-164. 

Henry VIII. (Shakespeare), 152. 

High Beech, Epping Forest, 33. 

" Higher Pantheism," 132. 

History of English Literature 

(Taine's), 1. 
Holderness, 3. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 188-189. 
"Holy Grail," 102-103, 121, 150. 
" Home they brought her warrior 

dead," 57. 
Homer, 17, 59, 103. 
Houghton, Lord (Monckton 

Milnes) , 26-27, 33, 53, 75, 83-84, 

86, 188-189. 
House of Lords, 171. 
Howard, Lord (Queen Mary) , 158. 
Ho witt, Mr., 3. 

Hugo, Victor, 125, 154, 157, 184. 
Hunt, Leigh, 76. 
Huxley, Professor, 68, 150. 
Hyperion (Keats), 44. 

I 

" Idiot Boy " (Wordsworth) , 124. 

Idylls of the King, 95-113, 125, 153. 

Iliad, 62, 112. 

" Immeasurable Sadness," Epi- 
gram, 133. 

In Memoriam, 30, 50, 63-74, 76, 
84, 138, 142. 

Ireland, 52, 61. 

Irving, Sir Henry, 164, 168. 

"Isabel," 17. 

" Iseult," 108-109. 

Isle of Wight, 54. See Farring- 
ford. 

Italy, 54, 75, 128. 



Jonson, Ben, 72. 

Joubert, 184. 

Jowett, Benjamin, 85-86, 93 note, 

95, 149, 179, 190. 
" Juvenilia," 16. 



196 



TENNYSON 



K 

Keats, 23, 28, 38, 43-44, 136, 
Kehama (Southey's), 94. 
Kenible, Fanny, 168. 
Kenilworth, 33. 
Khartoum, 150. 
Killarney, 61. 
Kinglake, 26. 
Kingsley, Charles, 5.7, 60. 
Kipling, Rudyard, 179. 
Knowles, James, 131. 
Knowles, Sheridan, 53, 76. 



La Fontaine, 168. 

< ' Lady of Shalott," 18, 27, 104, 122. 

Lake Country, 32, 33. 

Last Tournament, 108-109. 

"Launcelot," 103, 104-105, 112. 

" Launcelot and Elaine," 104-105. 

"Launcelot and Guinevere," 51. 

" Leper's Bride," 175. 

Lewes, G. H., 150. 

Liberalism, 5, 6, 28, 34. 

Lind, Jenny, 150. 

Lisbon, 95. 

Liverpool, Lord, 34. 

Locker, Frederick, 129-130. 

Locker, Miss, 152. 

"Locksley Hall," 48-50,53,116, 
133. 

" Locksley Hall Sixty Years Af- 
ter," 137-140, 172-173. 

London, 171, 178. 

London Revieio, 27. 

Longfellow, H. W., 150. 

Longfellows, The, 128. 

" Lord of Burleigh," 117. 

" Lotos Eaters," 25-26. 

Louth, 3. 

"Love thou the Land," 34. 

"Lover's Tale," 17-18. 

Lowell, J. R., 84. 

Luchon, 125. 

Lucretius, 68. 

"Lucretius" (Tennyson's), 43. 



Lushington, Edmund, 63-64. 
Lushingtons, The, 39. 
Lyall, Sir Charles, 50 note. 
Lyceum Theatre, 164. 
Lyrical Ballads, preface, 119, 
123, 124. 

M 

Mablethorpe, 28, 44-45. 

Macaulay, Lord, 96. 

" Madeline," 17. 

"Maid of Astolat" (Launcelot 
and Elaine), 95, 104. 

"Maid Marian" (Thomas Love 
Peacock) , 170. 

Malaga, 17. 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 97, 101, 108. 

"Margaret's Bridal Eve" 
(George Meredith's), 175. 

"Mariana in the Moated 
Grange," 19-20. 

" Mariana in the South," 18. 

"Mark" (The Last Tourna- 
ment) , 108, 109. 

Martineau, Harriet, 53. 

Mar veil, Andrew, 148. 

Mary Boyle, verses to, 6-7. 

Mary, Queen of Scots (Queen 
Mary), 155-157. 

Mary of Tudor (Queen Mary), 
155-157. 

Maud, 50, 73, 76, 83-94, 116, 133. 

Maurice, Frederick, 10. 

" May Queen, The," 118-120. 

Mayor, J. B., 23 note, 182. 

Memoirs of Lord Tennyson, by 
Lord Hallam Tennyson, 2-3, 
4, 5, 10-12, 28, 31, 32, 35, 36, 37, 
38, 39-40, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 
63, 65-66, 72, 76-77, 83, 86, 90, 
96, 99-100, 101, 126-128, 130-131, 
150, 153, 160, 162, 163, 166, 168, 
178, 179, 189, 190. 

Meredith, George, 175. 

Merivale, Dean, 10. 

" Merlin and the Gleam," 185. 



INDEX 



197 



Metaphysical Society, The, 131, 

132. 
Mill, J. S.,27. 
Mill, James, 55. 
Millais, Sir J. E., 190. 
Milton, 27, 40, 44, 91, 181. 
Mistral, 121 note. 
Moallakat (Arabian Poems) , 49- 

50. 
"Modred," 103, 110-111. 
Monckton Milnes. See Lord 

Houghton. 
Montgomery, James, 27-28. 
Morris, William, Life of, 76. 
Morte d' Arthur (Malory's), 97, 

108, 112. 
" Morte d' Arthur " (Tennyson's), 

24, 45-46, 110. 
Musset, Alfred de, 168. 

N 

Napoleon, 128. 
New England, 121. 
New York, 169. 
Newman, John Henry, 67, 150. 
Nineteenth Century, 131. 
Noailles (Queen Mary), 157. 
Noel, Roden, 123. 
"Northern Cobhler," 122. 
"Northern Farmer," 121-123, 
181. 

O 

" Ode on the Death of the Duke 
of Wellington," 77-78. 

Ode on the Intimations of Im- 
mortality (Wordsworth), 185. 

Odyssey, 40-41, 48, 62, 115. 

" CEnone," 23, 24, 176. 

Omar Khayyam, 178. 

Onomatopoeia, 92-93. 

Ormuzd, 176. 

« Owd Roa," 174. 

Owen, Professor, 128. 

Oxford, 9, 76. 

Oxford Movement, 33, 66. 



Paget, Lord {Queen Mary), 157, 

158. 
" Palace of Art," 18, 20-22, 37, 

45, 92. 
Palgrave, F., 130-131. 
Pantheism, 35, 132. 
Paradise Lost, 40. 
"Paris " (Death of OZnone), 175- 

176. 
" Passing of Arthur," 110-112. 
Past and Present (Carlyle's), 40. 
Pastorals, Tennyson's, 118-124, 

133. 
Peacock, Thomas Love, 170. 
Peel, Sir Robert, 52-53. 
"Philip van Artevelde" (Sir H. 

Taylor), 30. 
Philip of Spain (Queen Mary), 

165. 
Phillips, Stephen, 165. 
Plato, Jowett's, 149. 
Plays, Tennyson's, 154-170. 
Poems by Two Brothers, 4. 
Poems chiefly Lyrical, 13-17. 
Pole, Cardinal (Queen Mary), 

157, 158. 
Pope, 27, 51. 

Princess, The, 55-60, 61. 
Pritchard, Rev. Charles, 131. 
Promise of May, 166-168. 
Pyrenees, 17, 125. 



Quarterly Review, 15, 26-27, 91. 
Queen Mary, 154-160, 161, 162, 

163. 

R 
"Recollections of the Arabian 

Nights," 16. 
Remorse (Coleridge's), 154. 
Renard, Simon (Queen Mary), 

157. 
" Revenge, The," 63, 80. 
Rhine, 28, 54. 
Richard III. (Shakespeare's), 163. 



198 



TENNYSON 



Richter, Jean Paul, 40. 
"Ring, The," 175. 
Rizpah, 133, 134-135. 
Rogers, Samuel, 77. 
Roland, 98, 112. 
"Romney's Remorse," 175. 
"Rosamond" (Becket), 1(33-164. 
Rousseau, 49, 55. 
Ruskin, John, 85, 99-100. 
Russell, Lord John, 76. 
Rydal Mount, 32. 



St. James's Theatre, 168. 

" St. Simeon Stylites," 47, 51. 

St. Simonists, 28. 

Schiller, 157. 

Scilly Islands, 125. 

Scotland, 60, 121. 

Scott, Sir Walter, 13, 31, 82, 99, 

186. 
Selborne, Lord, 179. 
Sellwood, Emily. See Lady 

Tennyson. 
Sellwood, Louisa. See Mrs. 

Charles Tennyson. 
Senlac (Harold), 160, 162. 
Shakespeare, 7, 33, 62, 73-74, 86, 

90, 122, 130, 151, 154, 158, 162, 

180 ; Shakespeare's Sonnets, 

73-74; Shakespeare's English 

Chronicle Plays, 154. 
"Shallow" (Shakespeare), 122. 
Shelley, 6, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 64, 

154, 188, 189, 190. 
Shiplake Church, 75. 
Sidgwick, Henry, 55-56. 
" Silent Voices, The," 180, 184. 
"Sir Aylmer," 116, 117. 
"Sir Ector" (Morte d' Arthur), 

112. 
"Sir Galahad," 51. 
Somersby, 3, 17, 28, 31, 33. 
" Song of the Three Sisters," 10- 

11. 
Southey, 15, 29, 77-78, 94. 



Spain, 17, 95. 
Spanish Refugees, 17. 
Spedding, James, 39. 
Speddings, The, 32. 
Spenser, 97, 98, 102. 
" Spinster's Sweet 'Arts," 123. 
Stamford Bridge (Harold), 160. 
Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, 

Life of, 7-8. 
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 7-8, 131. 
Sterling, John, 10. 
Stratford-on-Avon, 33. 
Sublime and Beautiful (Burke's 

Treatise), 183. 
" Summer Oak," 40. 
Sumuer, Charles, 33. 
Swinburne, 165, 181. 
Switzerland, 54-55. 
Synorix (The Cup), 168. 



Table Talk (Coleridge), 15. 

Taine, M., 1, 182. 

"Talking Oak, The," 47-48, 94. 

Taylor, Sir Henry, 30-31, 76, 77, 
85. 

" Tears, Idle Tears," 57, 63. 

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Birth 
at Somersby, 3 ; school at Louth , 
3-4; taught by his father, 4; 
Poems by Two Brothers, 4; 
entered Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, 4 ; life at the University, 
4-12; prize poem, Timbuctoo, 
8; poems written at Cambridge, 
10-12; Poems chiefly Lyrical, 
13; its reception by the critics, 
14-15 ; journey to the Pyrenees, 
17; return to Somersby, 17; 
publication of second volume 
of poems, 17 ; visit to the Con- 
tinent, 28; death of Arthur 
Hallam, 29-30; Tennyson's cor- 
respondence, 31-32 ; visit to the 
Lake Country, 32; removal 
from Somersby to High Beech, 



INDEX 



199 



Epping Forest, 33; to Tun- 
bridge Wells, 33 ; publication of 
two volumes of Poetry, 38; 
travels in England and Ireland, 
52; received pension of £200, 
53 ; visit to Belgium and Swit- 
zerland, 54-55; The Princess, 
55; lived at Cheltenham, 60; 
In Memoriam, 64 ; marriage at 
Shiplake, 75; took house at 
Warninglid, Sussex, 75; re- 
moved to Chapel House, Twick- 
enham, 75 ; first child born and 
died, 75; visit to Italy, 75; 
Laureateship offered and ac- 
cepted, 76-77, 187 ; birth of son 
afterwards Lord Hallam Ten- 
nyson, 83 ; purchased Farring- 
ford, 83; Maud, 84; Idylls of 
the King, 95; short visit to 
Spain, 95; Enoch Arden, 113; 
excursion to Cornwall and 
Scilly Islands, 125 ; visit to the 
Continent, 125 ; tour to Water- 
loo, 128; built Aldworth in 
Surrey, 129; made Honorary 
Fellow of Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, 149 ; offered and declined 
baronetcy, 149-150 ; Queen 
Mary, 154 ; Harold, 160 ; Becket, 
162 ; accepted peerage, 171 ; 
publication of last volume of 
poems, 177; death, 180; per- 
sonal characteristics, 130, 190 ; 
religious and philosophical 
views, 7, 12, 28, 34-35, 64-72, 
129-149, 178, 183, 185 ; political 
views, 5-7, 28-29, 33-34, 171, 
185-186 ; views on poetry, 31 ; 
Tennyson's pictorial power and 
method, 9, 17, 18-19, 20-21, 44- 
45, 118-119, 124 ; his care in re- 
vision, 19-20, 24, 35-38; his 
treatment of nature, 21, 44, 64- 
65, 68, 109-110, 118-119, 124, 
182-183 ; his treatment of Greek 
Myths, 23-26, 44 ; Tennyson as 



a dramatist, 154-170 ; his metre, 
23, 43-44, 49, 72, 93-94, 181-182 ; 
simplicity of diction, 119-121; 
his management of dialect, 120- 
121, 122; Tennyson and his 
times, 2, 182, 185-190 ; his treat- 
ment by the critics, 14-16, 26- 
28, 39; his influence in litera- 
ture, 186-190. 

Tennyson, Dr. George Clayton 
(Tennyson's father), 3, 4, 28. 

Tennyson, Elizabeth (his moth- 
er)^. 

Tennyson, Charles (brother), 4, 
74. 

Tennyson, Emily (sister), 29-30. 

Tennyson, Cecilia (sister) , 64. 

Tennyson, Emily, Lady, 35, 74- 
75, 150, 155; Lady Tennyson's 
Diary, 150-152, 155. 

Tennyson, Hallam, Lord (son), 
2, 83. See Memoirs of Lord 
Tennyson, by Lord Hallam 
Tennyson. 

Tennyson, Lionel (son), 152. 

Tennyson, Mrs. Charles, 74. 

Tennyson, F., 52. 

Tennysoniana, 72-73. 

Thackeray, 61-62, 95. 

Thalaba (Southey) , 94. 

"The splendour falls on castle 
walls," 57. 

" The Tribute," 84-85. 

Theodore, King of Abyssinia, 
128. 

Timbuctoo, prize poem, 8-10. 

" Tiresias," 145-147, 174. 

Titania, 169-170. 

" Tithonus," 23, 42-43. 

Torrigo, 17. 

Tourgueneff, 150. 

Trinity College, Cambridge, 4, 
149. 

"Tristram and Iseult," 108-110. 

Tunbridge Wells, 33. 

Turner, J. M. W., 59. 

Twickenham, 75, 83. 



200 



TENNYSON 



" Two Voices," 30, 50-51. 
Tyndall, Professor, 86. 

U 
" Ulysses," 23, 24, 40-42, 47, 53, 

95. 
" Underwood " (Ben Jonson) , 72. 

V 

" Vastness," 140, 141, 146, 174. 
Vere, Aubrey de, 32-33, 39. 
Victoria, Queen, 76-77, 98, 171, 

177, 186. 
Vienna, 30, 63. 
"Village Life," 122. 
" Vision of Sin," 40. 

W 

Wales, North, 33. 
" Walking to the Mail," 47. 
Warninglid, Sussex, 75. 
Waterloo, 128. 



Watson, William, 179. 
Watts, G., 190. 
Weimar, 128. 
Wellington, Duke of, 77. 
Westminster Abbey, 180. 
Westminster Review, 15. 
White, Sir Thomas ( Queen Mary) , 

157. 
William the Conqueror (Harold) , 

160, 162. 
William the Silent, 155. 
Wilson, Professor, 15. 
Woodbridge, 152. 
Wordsworth, Charles, 9. 
Wordsworth, William, 13, 15, 18- 

19, 29, 32-33, 39, 46-47, 67-68, 

71, 76, 77, 78, 119-120, 123-124, 

185, 188, 189. 
" Wreck, The," 133. 
Wulfnoth {Harold), 160-161. 
Wyatt, Sir Thomas (Queen 

Mary), 157,158, 159-160. 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

EDITED BY 

JOHN MORLEY 
Cloth. i2mo. Price, 40 cents, each 



ADDISON. By W. J. Courthope. 
BACON. By R. W. Church. 
BENTLEY. By Prof. Jebb. 
BUNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 
BURKE. By John Morley. 
BURNS. By Principal Shairp. 
BYRON. By Prof. Nichol. 
CARLYLE. By Prof. Nichol. 
CHAUCER. By Prof. A. W. Ward. 
COLERIDGE. By H. D. Traill. 
COWPER. By Goldwin Smith. 
DEFOE. By W. Minto. 
DE QUINCEY. By Prof. Masson. 
DICKENS. By A. W.Ward. 
DRYDEN. By G. Saintsbury. 
FIELDING. By Austin Dobson. 
GIBBON. By J. Cotter Morison. 
GOLDSMITH. By William Black. 
GRAY. By Edmund Gosse. 
HUME. By T. H. Huxley. 
JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 



KEATS. By Sidney Colvin. 
LAMB. By Alfred Ainger. 
LANDOR. By Sidney Colvin. 
LOCKE. By Prof. Fowler. 
MACAULAY. 

By J. Cotter Morison. 
MILTON. By Mark Pattison. 
POPE. By Leslie Stephen. 
SCOTT. By R. H. Hutton. 
SHELLEY. By J. A. Symonds. 
SHERIDAN. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 

By J. A. Symonds. 
SOUTHEY. By Prof. Dowden. 
SPENSER. By R. W. Church. 
STERNE. By H. D. Traill. 
SWIFT. By Leslie Stephen. 
THACKERAY. By A. Trollope. 
WORDSWORTH. 

By F. W. H. Myers. 



NEW VOLUMES 
Cloth. i2mo. Price, 75 cents net 
GEORGE ELIOT. By Leslie Stephen. 

WILLIAM HAZLITT. By Augustine Birrell. 

MATTHEW ARNOLD. By Herbert W. Paul. 

JOHN RUSKIN. By Frederic Harrison. 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

EDITED BY 

JOHN MORLEY 

THREE BIOGRAPHIES IN EACH VOLUME 



Cloth. i2mo. Price, $1.00, each 



CHAUCER. By Adolphus William Ward. SPENSER. By R. W. 

Church. DRYDEN. By George Saintsbury. 
MILTON. By Mark Pattison, B.D. GOLDSMITH. By William 

Black. COWPER. By Goldwin Smith. 
BYRON. By John Nichol. SHELLEY. By John Addington 

Symonds. KEATS. By Sidney Colvin, M.A. 

WORDSWORTH. By F. W. H. Myers. SOUTHEY. By Edward 

Dowden. LANDOR. By Sidney Colvin, M.A. 
LAMB. By Alfred Ainger. ADDISON. By W. J. Courthope. 

SWIFT. By Leslie Stephen. 
SCOTT. By Richard H. Hutton. BURNS. By Principal Shairp. 

COLERIDGE. B.y H. D. Traill. 
HUME. By T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. LOCKE. By Thomas Fowler. 

BURKE. By John Morley. 
FIELDING. By Austin Dobson. THACKERAY. By Anthony 

Trollope. DICKENS. By Adolphus William Ward. 
GIBBON. By J. Cotter Morison. CARLYLE. By John Nichol. 

MACAULAY. By J. Cotter Morison. 
SIDNEY. By J. A. Symonds. DE QUINCEY. By David Masson. 

SHERIDAN. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
POPE. By Leslie Stephen. JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 

GRAY. By Edmund Gosse. 
BACON. By R. W. Church. BUNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 

BENTLEY. By R. C. Jebb. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 



g kb± ^ 



C> *o . ♦ • K <\ 




' • . * ,0 



ACL 
























^ *°:«« 



A < 






* v *<>• 




cr • * * • 




\* ... C 







■ O:. 5 -K •- • ZQK * Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 




,cr "*«*•..»•'«>* 







i:\y--r 



'■ '> 



Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2009 

PreservationTechnologies 

tf, / A WORLD LEADER IN COLLECTIONS PRESERVATIOI 

o *$* ^& - 111 Thomson Park Drive 

V \ Oonhorrv Tnwnshin PA 1 6066 







o. *© * . « v <\ 








HECKMAN 

BINDERY INC. 

198! 






